As of early 2025, you no longer have the option to enable Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the UK. Users in the UK who had already enabled ADP “will be given a period of time to disable the feature themselves to keep using their iCloud account” - which has not happened yet as of Jan 2026.
Related, I was able to do the following:
Switch the region from the UK to a different one.
Enable ADP.
Switch back to the UK.
ADP now appears as On in the iCloud UI, is there a way to validate it is doing what it’s supposed to be doing?
The danger would be that you lose access to your data. When Apple first disabled ADP in the UK it gave users a set time period to disable it or download the data.
Doing nothing would have resulted in loss of the data in the cloud.
Your work around may work but would make me a bit nervous that one day you wouldn’t be able to sync or access your iCloud data.
My understanding is that this hasn’t happened yet. Apple’s latest blog post about this is as of Sep 2025 and giving users a set time to disable ADP is still future tense as of today.
