Encryption in this post-truth, post-trust and post-privacy world

Most will be aware of the leaked information that the UK government had demanded that Apple provide a way to access encrypted data held worldwide. Apple have an option called Advanced Data Protection (ADP) which encrypts data end-to-end. This is an option the user needs to enable - it is off by default - but Apple do point out that some data, healt data for example is always encrypted regardless of this setting. The BBC among others carried the story back in February, 2025... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20g288yldko

Had Apple agreed it would technically mean that the UK could access users' data anywhere regardless of their nationality.

Rather than break their encryption Apple disabled ADP for UK users. The US became involved - you can find this all in the news - and there was some indication that the UK had backed down although later we learned that in fact the UK simply modified their request to include only UK users. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c740r0m4mzjo

Ok this is all old news although it is still trickling along. But we are fortunate - which may be the wrong word here - that the information was leaked as otherwise all of these various dealings are supposed to be held in private. That leads to the question how many other companies has the UK government sent demands to and have any agreed and thus broken E2EE?

With that in mind it is really hard to see how we can still trust any of this technology.