2021-05-19 12:02:20
Huge NYT article on Apple's flexing under the Chinese government. Based in part on documents from the trial with Epic Games (which has been generating news feeds for several weeks now), and in part on statements and documents from sources.
Briefly:
- The Chinese are very demanding of foreign companies, you can't say no to them. Everyone sags, Apple is no exception, but while its freedom-loving rhetoric “Privacy is the foundation of our company” coincides with the rhetoric of US politicians condemning China for surveillance and other undemocratic restrictions on human rights, in reality Apple is helping the Chinese government with everything. to enforce it;
- A striking bold example is how Apple proactively monitors and removes banned apps from the Chinese App Store. Well, that is, the Chinese government does not have any list of prohibited applications: when they really need it, they send a request to Apple, and they usually delete the application. But much more often a situation occurs when Apple moderators themselves see an application in which official China is criticized in one way or another, and ban it even before receiving a request. The funny thing is that such cases do not fall into the official Apple reports on government requests. Well, some cases are personally approved or rejected by Tim Cook himself, as was the case with the removal of the NYT application;
- An illustrative case of the removal of the application of the disgraced Chinese businessman Guo Wengui: after the first removal, it was added to the internal list on a special wiki page "Chinese App Store Removal" so that Apple moderators: everything connected with it should be removed. Then Guo updated his application to somehow bypass the automatic moderation filters, and when this application was checked by a live moderator, he did not find anything forbidden - and missed the ad to the store. The Chinese saw this, got furious, called the boss of this moderator at night, he wrote to everyone "No applications of Guo Wengui can be in the Chinese store" and instructed to check how it turned out there. The moderator stated that it was not his fault: the application itself did not violate anything. He was told that the criticism of the Chinese government was enough to remove. In short, six months later this moderator was fired "for poor performance";
- China also requires Apple to place the data of its users on the territory of the country. Until some time, American laws prohibited Apple from doing this, but the Chinese found a loophole: they created a special state-owned company, and Apple changed the legal agreement for users, in which they transferred their data not only to Apple, but also to this company. In short, now there is already a data center where all the data of Chinese iCloud users should be stored (the deadline was until June 2021), but the story with the encryption keys is not yet clear. Allegedly, these keys are also stored in the same data center, but under the protection of Apple. On the other hand, some researchers believe that they deliberately chose a different protection scheme so that the Chinese, if desired, could easily break or bypass this protection, if necessary - because they also have physical access. But so far there are no proofs that it was or that there is any interest in the Chinese government to do this.
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