BlackBerry leaving Pakistan over privacy flaps

NEW YORK—BlackBerry is getting booted out of Pakistan after the Canadian smartphone manufacturer could not reach a satisfactory agreement with the government over an issue that BlackBerry chief operating officer Marty Beard wrote in a company blog would have meant “forfeiting our commitment to protect our user’s privacy.”

BlackBerry will be leaving the country on December 30, when Pakistan’s “shutdown order” goes into effect. That’s a month after the order was originally supposed to go into effect.

The controversy dates back to July when the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority notified the country’s mobile phone operators that the BlackBerry Enterprise Servers “would no longer be allowed to operate in the country starting in December ‘for security reasons.’”

"The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every BES e-mail and BES BBM message,” Beard writes. “But BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive. As we have said many times, we do not support 'back doors' granting open access to our customers’ information and have never done this anywhere in the world.”

While Beard says “we regret leaving this important market…BlackBerry’s focus will remain on protecting corporate, government and military communications throughout the world, including in South Asia and the Middle East, wherever our technology operates.”

By midday Monday, BlackBerry’s stock was trading at $7.97, up 1.85%.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter