- If Apple decides to take legal action against the UK, it looks like it has Elon Musk’s support.
- Government officials alleged the UK government issued a “secret” order for data access to iPhones.
- Musk has been critical of Apple’s privacy practices in the past.
In a rare move, Elon Musk looks like he’s taking Apple’s side on a privacy issue.
The tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency appeared to praise Apple in response to an X post saying the tech firm would push back on an alleged “secret” order to give the UK government access to iPhone cloud content. Musk said it was “good” for Apple to pursue legal action against the UK.
Though the tech giant hasn’t confirmed a government order or any legal filings, letters between congressmen and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard condemned the alleged order and accused the UK of implementing a gag order to prevent Apple from acknowledging it.
Not long after Gabbard wrote about the “secret” order, Apple said it’d remove its highest level of security, known as Advanced Data Protection, from UK iPhones.
Enter Musk, with a one-word endorsement rallying behind Apple.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In the past, Musk has been vocal about Apple’s privacy practices, but it wasn’t this positive. After Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Siri in 2024, Musk accused the company of “handing your data over to a third-party.” The alleged order from the UK concerns access to data stored in the cloud, not AI.
“The truth is that handing your data over to digital superintelligence (that Apple themselves cannot even build or understand) at the operating system level is insane,” Musk posted on X a day after Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024.
Privacy is a hallmark of Apple products, and the tech giant says it prioritizes preserving it. It has doubled down on its stance against creating a backdoor or master key for agencies to access users’ data.
“As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will,” Apple previously said in a statement to BI.
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