More Years For Blackberry To Stay In Pakistan

The Canadian firm announced a plan to withdraw from the South Asian country in November in response to the Pakistani government’s apparent demand for access to data held with the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) for corporate customers.

Beleaguered phone maker BlackBerry has u-turned on its decision to exit Pakistan after it claimed it had struck an agreement with authorities over previous demands for access to user data.

From the company post; Blackberry explained that it would be staying on in Pakistan- “After productive discussions, the Government of Pakistan has rescinded its shutdown order, and BlackBerry has decided to remain in the Pakistan market. 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”.

BlackBerry prides itself on secure storage of data, but in the past it has made concessions in this area. It previously granted authorities access to data from BBM and BIS in 2013, while it was reported to have wavered on its stance in order to do business in Russia and China in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

Pakistan is a market known for a heavy-handed approach to data monitoring, so this about-face is somewhat expected.