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Blackberry has decided to exit Pakistan by the end of 2015 rather than comply with government data retention requests:
Phone-maker Blackberry is to stop operating in Pakistan at the end of 2015 because of government requests to monitor customer data. The Pakistani government wanted to be able to monitor every message and email sent via its phones, it said. In a blogpost, it said it had decided to "exit the market altogether" over the row. It said Pakistan's demand was not to do with public safety but a request for "unfettered access".
In July, Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority told Blackberry the servers underpinning its messaging business would no longer be allowed to operate in the country, citing "security reasons". Marty Beard, chief operating officer at Blackberry, said the "truth" of the matter was Pakistan had wanted to look at all the traffic passing across its messaging servers but the phone company would not "comply with that sort of directive".
"Remaining in Pakistan would have meant forfeiting our commitment to protect our users' privacy. That is a compromise we are not willing to make," wrote Mr Beard.
This led Pakistan to tell Blackberry its servers could no longer operate in the country. Mr Beard said Blackberry did not support "backdoors" that would grant open access to customers' information and had never complied with such a request anywhere in the world.
Maybe they deserve more than a 0.5% share of the global smartphone market.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kbahey on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:04AM
The truth is that Pakistan has announced back in July that BlackBerry will be shut down in the country by December
Pakistan to shut down BlackBerry services by December over 'security' [reuters.com].
BlackBerry is trying to make this look like a principled stance. But my gut feel is that they are leaving an small or unprofitable market that they have been pushed out of, and making it look like they care for customers, and all that ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @07:13PM
Yes, that's in the summary.
With around 200 million people, I wouldn't call Pakistan a small market. Perhaps the expense of allowing the interception is one reason for Blackberry's decision. They make it sound as though the level of access Pakistan demanded is greater than what India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia asked for and got.