Russia Pulls the Plug on FaceTime
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While it was encouraging to see Apple resisting government overreach in India this week, it seems that the days won’t be quite as sunny for iPhone users in Russia.
Reuters reports that Russian authorities have ordered FaceTime blocked in the country, claiming that it’s being used for criminal activity.
“According to law enforcement agencies, FaceTime is being used to organise and carry out terrorist attacks in the country, recruit perpetrators, and commit fraud and other crimes against Russian citizens,” Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communication regulator, said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
FaceTime is the latest casualty in the state communications watchdog’s broader attempts to shut down foreign tech platforms. It’s already imposed restrictions against YouTube, WhatsApp, and Telegram, making similar allegations against those platforms, although iMessage oddly seems to have escaped its notice so far.
Russian officials have not provided any specific evidence to support their allegations of criminal activity on any of these platforms, but opponents of the move believe it’s telling that the state launched its own rival app called MAX (not to be confused with HBO’s service, which fortuitously rebranded itself back to “HBO Max” this year).
Critics believe that Russian authorities are banning foreign apps to push users to this state-run communications app, which would open the door to government surveillance. The state media have dismissed this notion as false.
It’s not entirely clear what steps Apple has taken to comply with Russia’s demands — if any. While the FaceTime app remains available on Russian iPhones, Reuters notes that Moscow residents have been unable to place voice calls to friends and family, seeing a “User unavailable” message.
That’s a stark contrast to how Apple typically handles FaceTime bans. For example, FaceTime has been blocked in the UAE since the day it launched, and iPhones sold in that region lack the app entirely. That’s not the case in Russia.
It’s more likely that Russian authorities are blocking the specific data protocols FaceTime uses to establish connections to other users. That’s not difficult to do from a networking perspective — many schools and businesses employ similar measures at their firewalls, and Russian internet and mobile services effectively operate under state control, allowing the government to establish their own firewalls, similar to what’s been commonplace in China for years.
Apple doesn’t run any FaceTime servers in these countries, so all it takes is blocking those connections from leaving the country. This would be in line with the strategy Roskomnadzor has been using for other services like YouTube and Roblox, which it blocked earlier this week alleging that it was distributing extremist materials and “LGBT propaganda.”
Meanwhile, WhatsApp and Telegram have raised the ire of Russian authorities for allegedly refusing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases. Like Apple, these services typically comply with lawful orders to disclose information. However, WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption would make it impossible to give anything up to law enforcement, and Apple doesn’t record or log FaceTime calls. Companies can’t give out what they don’t have.
In theory, it might be possible for Russian users to bypass some of these limitations by using a VPN, but that assumes that Russian authorities haven’t also blocked VPN protocols.
