This post was originally published on Mashable.
Last week, Apple announced that starting with iOS 8, the company would no longer help police get some of the most sensitive data on your phone, including messages, emails, contacts and call history.
And it’s not that it doesn’t want to anymore, it’s that now Apple says it can no longer do it — even if it wanted to.
“Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data,” the company said in its new privacy policy.
Many, including privacy advocates, rejoiced at the news — but some police officers are not that happy. And although there are still other ways cops can get their hands on your iPhone data, authorities are still complaining.
“It’s definitely going to impact investigations, there’s no doubt about that,” Dennis Dragos, a former New York Police Department detective who worked for 11 years in the computer crimes squad, told Mashable.
“Detectives are trained to follow down every single lead, follow every possible trail until you get to the resolution of your investigation,” he continued.
“This is now a dead end. You’re closing a door that was available before.”
Dragos is not the only one who thinks that way.
On Thursday, FBI Director James Comey himself said that he was “very concerned” about Apple’s decision.
John Escalante, the chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department, said that because of this change, “Apple will become the phone of choice for the paedophile.”
For some law enforcement officials, this could even become a matter of life and death. In a Washington Post op-ed, Ronald T. Hosko, the former assistant director at the FBI Criminal Investigative Division, complained that Apple’s new privacy stance, later followed by Android, will “protect many thousands of criminals who seek to do us great harm, physically or financially.”
“[Criminals’] phones contain contacts, texts, and geo-tagged data that can help police track down accomplices,” Hosko wrote. “These new rules will make it impossible for us to access that information. They will create needless delays that could cost victims their lives.”
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