A big legal battle is brewing between Apple and the UK government.

Hello, this is the Marketplace Morning Report, and we're live from the BBC World Service.

I'm Leanna Byrne. Good morning.

Today, Apple and the UK government are battling it out legally behind closed doors.

At the heart of this fight is your privacy data.

The BBC's Chris Valence joins us to break it down.

Hello, Chris.

Hi there.

So by the standards of Western democracies,

the United Kingdom has some pretty wide-ranging laws

that enable law enforcement security services

to gather data from tech and telecommunication firms.

Principally, that's all contained something called the Investigatory Powers Act,

which critics have always called the Snoopers Charter.

One of its powers enables officials to issue secret orders to tech firms.

Now, earlier this year, the Washington Post broke the news

that in January, Apple had been issued

with one of these secret notices by the UK government, requiring it to put a backdoor

into a service called Advanced Data Protection.

Now, that's an opt-in service, and it encrypts stuff like your I-Cloud photos and your chat backups.

And the important thing is it does it in a way that means that Apple itself can't decrypt them.

Effectively, it doesn't have the keys that it could hand over to law enforcement to unlock that data.

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