MOSCOW, September 18 (RIA Novosti) - Apple said it will no longer unlock its devices at the request of police, even if they have a search warrant, an official statement on the company's website says.
The move comes alongside the company's new privacy policy statement from its chief Tim Cook, which claims that maintaining clients' trust is the company's aim.
"I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will," Cook's statement on the Apple website reads.
Apple has developed its latest encryption software to ensure that no one except the device's owner would be able to access user data.
Apple once maintained the ability to unlock some content on devices for legally binding police requests but will no longer do so for devices running the iOS 8 operating system.
"Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data… So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8," the statement said.
Apple still has the legal responsibility to provide police with data stored elsewhere, for example on iCloud, which usually has the backups of users' emails, photos and videos. Thus, anyone willing to completely protect their privacy should disable iCloud sharing on their devices.
Last week, Apple released its new iPhone 6 with the iOS 8 operating system. In most European stores, customers will be able to buy the device starting from September 19. The operating system, featuring updated photo editing tools and time-lapse videos, is available for download from today.
