Two major firms, namely Apple and Meta, have criticized the Canadian law that might compromise encryption. This controversy arose from the recently introduced bill in Canada known as Bill C-22. This initiative comes from the ruling party of the country, the Liberals.
This bill is now being considered within the House of Commons of Canada; however, the proposal has received significant resistance from leading technology companies and concerned parties. The American firm Apple claims that the Canadian law will oblige firms to create “backdoors” to their encryption services. Security specialists are convinced that once there is a backdoor, it will be hard for the government to keep control of it.
Encryption services provide protection from hacking and unauthorized access to messages, photographs, cloud services, and other data. Leading companies, including Apple, apply end-to-end encryption so that only their customers will have access to their data. This type of encryption became the backbone of the digital privacy sector.
Apple and Meta Challenge Canada’s Proposed Surveillance Law
According to representatives from Canada, Bill C-22 will ensure a rapid reaction from law enforcement agencies concerning terrorism, criminal activities, and exploitation online. Apple disagrees.
In comments sent to Reuters, the corporation noted that the draft law “would hinder our ability to provide the robust privacy and security capabilities our customers demand from Apple.” The firm further emphasized that the bill could give the Canadian government the opportunity to compel firms to degrade encryption.
Meta expressed similar reservations about the legislation. In particular, Meta stated that the bill grants sweeping authority but lacks adequate safeguards. According to Meta, the bill could compromise Canadians’ safety rather than protect them.
The controversy resembles another case of conflict between Apple and the UK earlier this year. In February 2025, according to reports, British officials requested access to iCloud data on an extensive scale. Apple declined and subsequently disabled the Advanced Data Protection mode in the UK.
The latter enables end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups, notes, images, and other stored information. Without this capability, certain types of content remain accessible to Apple via legal requests.
It is noteworthy that concerns about the situation were raised even in the USA. The US intelligence services were concerned whether the British request could be seen as a violation of the data exchange agreement on cloud computing. Later reports claimed that under pressure from the US, the UK government withdrew its request.
Indeed, Apple seems prepared for yet another long battle for the sake of protecting encryption technology.
Security, Privacy, and the Global Impact of Bill C-22
Apple has been defending this technology for a number of years. Back in 2016, the company refused to comply with the US court order demanding to unlock the phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. According to Tim Cook, Apple CEO, providing the tool that can be used to bypass phone encryption will establish a dangerous precedent.
Tim Cook’s opinion on the issue did not change significantly. For example, Apple continues believing that the system allowing government agencies to access phones’ encrypted information would not remain secure from other parties.
Many cybersecurity specialists share that point of view. It is noteworthy that many experts see encryption backdoors as a vulnerability rather than as an access method for authorized entities.
Governments all over the world still dispute such an attitude. They state that secure services may prevent law enforcement from investigating some severe cases. The issue arises that the police is going dark as they cannot use communication services related to criminal investigations anymore.
The issue about security vs. privacy has been present in legislation for more than a decade. Now, one more attempt at solving the problem is Canada’s Bill C-22.
It can influence many other governments besides Canada’s. In case of adoption of the current version of the bill, other countries will follow Canada’s example, which is quite concerning for tech companies because it might mean that they have to compromise encryption in more countries.
Right now, both Apple and Meta refuse to do so. It remains unclear whether the legislators would go against the companies’ interests.
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