We reported earlier that BlackBerry Limited will stop operating in Pakistan over the country’s demands to get backdoor access to all BSES servers. Though now the company has officially confirmed that Pakistan’s government has dropped the order. Hence, the Canadian manufacturer will continue to operate in the country without giving away any data access to government authorities.
“We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry’s position that we cannot provide the content of our customers’ BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers,” wrote Marty Chief, Chief Operating Officer at BlackBerry.
Earlier, BlackBerry said that it would rather stop operating in the country instead of providing the government with ‘unfettered’ access to its BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, including BlackBerry Mail and Messenger.
Hence, It’s rather good news for the struggling Canadian manufacturer as exiting the country would have further added to its misery given the recent poor quarterly earnings. BlackBerry has clearly established itself on the premise that users privacy is its ultimate priority, and to its credit did not submit to the government’s demands despite going through an all-time low.
Earlier this month, BlackBerry CEO suggested some exceptions to the company’s privacy policy. He said that the company will be ready to provide private user information over to law enforcement agencies under emergency circumstances. He also added that Blackberry won’t provide actual communications between users, though would offer other useful information that’ll aid criminal investigations such as the phone’s location and certain meta-data.
The company has had similar requests in the past. Back in 2010, countries including India and Saudi Arabia also made similar demands threatening to ban BlackBerry over its denial to hand over personal correspondence between its customers. However, the company was able to convince them to comply with its existing policies, saying that they’ve always been willing to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies to help in criminal investigations.
