The UK quietly lost Advanced Data Protection. Here’s what it means for your notes.

A privacy protection that millions of people relied on, or could have, quietly stopped being available in one country. If you’re in the UK, this one’s worth two minutes of your time.

Privacy · 3 min read

Here’s the situation in plain terms, In iOS there’s a security setting called Advanced Data Protection (ADP). When it’s on, your iCloud data, Notes included, becomes end-to-end encrypted, which means even Apple can’t read it. In early 2025 Apple stopped offering that setting to new users in the UK, and asked existing UK users to switch it off, following a UK government access demand.

Why? Because, as has been widely reported, the UK government asked Apple for a way to access protected data, and rather than build a back door into a global system, Apple withdrew the strong protection instead. Whether it can be forced further is, at the time of writing, being fought out in the courts.

I’m not here to re-litigate that. I’m here to tell you what it means for your notes, and what you can actually do.

What it means, practically

If you’re a new Apple user in the UK, you can’t turn on the setting that would make your iCloud Notes unreadable to Apple. So your notes sit under a key Apple holds, and what Apple has access to can, in principle, be reached by anyone with the legal power to compel it.

Again, for a lot of what people keep in Notes, that’s no drama. But it’s a real change to the ceiling of privacy available to you, made without most people ever noticing, and that’s exactly why it’s worth noticing now.

What you can do

• Check your setting. If you’re an existing user who had ADP on, confirm what state it’s in now.
• Lock the sensitive notes individually, which encrypts them end-to-end even on a standard account. Fine for a handful, a chore for a lifetime of notes.
• Move the private stuff to something that’s encrypted on your device by default, where there’s no national setting to lose in the first place.

Why this is the case Catchlight exists for

We’ll be straight that this exact moment is part of why we built Catchlight. When the strongest protection a lot of us relied on can be removed by a decision we don’t get a vote on, “just trust the big company” stops feeling like a plan.

Catchlight doesn’t have a setting to lose. Every note, task and reminder is encrypted on your device with a 12-word Privacy Phrase that only you hold. There’s no account, no cloud of ours, and nothing for anyone to compel us to open, because we genuinely can’t. It reads the same in London as it does anywhere else, and no policy change in any country can quietly take that away from you.

If you want the longer version of how that works, what zero-knowledge actually means for your notes is the place to start.