While the world is still going gaga over the FBI claiming to have cracked the code to hack the once security pious iPhone, the Indian government has dropped another big bomb on Apple.
According to a news piece published in a national daily, India's communications and IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that India has a mobile forensics tool up its ante that is capable enough to handle smartphones, including Apple's iPhone.
For people keeping a close watch on tech news, might be already aware about the infamous FBI and Apple legal battle that took place earlier this year. The US government demanded the tech giant to help them get access to a locked iPhone 5C device apparently used by one of the two terrorists having a hand in the San Bernardino, California attack that took place in December leaving 14 people dead. The tech giant decided not to honour the government's request stating its policies and didn't budge from its decision even when a court order was sent to it. At the end, the FBI finally zeroed in on a third party person(s) to help them provide a hand in bypassing the iPhone's strong security.
In the year 2010, a similar case happened with the then famous Blackberry. The company faced a hard time when India and other countries demanded on having an access to the encrypted customer data stored on the com servers. According to a statement by the company then, it could not provide access to the data, as it does not possess the encryption keys.
Majority of the technology firms believe that weakening encryption, which involves scrambling the data so that it can be read and accessed by the intended person, directly violates the privacy of the device owners. On the other hand, Law enforcement officials counter the their claim by stating that encryption hinders their ability to access data in criminal investigations.
While who is right and who is wrong, is something which we surely can't assess, but the only way to deal with the situation at hand, is to find a middle way to work through it, instead of getting into frivolous legal battles.
[Top Image - simone mescolini / Shutterstock.com]
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