Apple clinched a major win Monday after the U.S. government announced that the U.K. had agreed to drop its demand for the company to provide a “back door” granting officials access to users’ encrypted data. The iPhone maker won’t be alone to rejoice in the outcome. The development came after extensive talks between Britain and the U.S., which had raised national security concerns over the request. At the root of the row was end-to-end encryption, a technology which secures communications between two devices in a way that means not even the company providing a chat service can view any messages. The story of Apple’s U.K. privacy battle started earlier this year, when it was reported that the British government had demanded access to the company’s encrypted cloud service via a technical “back door.” Such a back door has long been contested by Apple. In 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation…
