BlackBerry will keep operating in Pakistan

While BlackBerry had eventually agreed to give India access to user messages and emails on its Messenger service, it still refused to comply with its request to turn in BES emails and messages.

A Canadian flag flies at BlackBerry’s headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., Tuesday, July 9, 2013.

“We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry’s position that we can not provide the content of our customers’ BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers”, writes Beard in the recent blog post.

BlackBerry’s departure was announced at the end of last November, so it was a surprise to many when the company more recently announced that it was able to work out an agreement with Pakistan to continue operations in 2016.

The development would come as a huge relief for BlackBerry considering that Pakistan is one of the very few remaining countries where people are still attracted to BlackBerry devices.

On Friday the mobile giant confirmed officially the government has dropped the demand and hence they will continue the operation in Pakistan without giving away any data access.

BlackBerry didn’t comply with the directive for it doesn’t support “back doors” granting open access to customers’ information and have never done this anywhere in the world.

BlackBerry is rolling out its latest Priv smartphone across the world. Mr. Beard expressed gratitude toward the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and the government for understanding Blackberry’s policies. Meanwhile, BlackBerry announced exiting from Pakistan by the end of this year, vowing, it would not compromise on privacy of its users. And several other have threatened to ban the company for refusing to hand over the requested data. He said that the company will be ready to provide private user information over to law enforcement agencies under emergency circumstances.