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Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent

210 points by tysone 9y ago

largehotcoffee 9y ago
VPN apps are completely different than what happened with the FBI unlocking request last year.
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
Easy for China to threaten seizure of Apple's manufacturing capabilities. Shareholders won't like that. When something doesn't make sense, follow the money.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  China would probably never go that far. At best, they would just cut off the retail market in China and leave it completely to the 黄牛 yellow cow scalpers like it was 10+ years ago.
cletus 9y ago
Good advice I got once: not every surface is a slippery slope.
y_u_no_rust 9y ago
I don't see how there's much Apple can do here they are a technology company not a world power
IBM 9y ago
I'll repost my comment from the other thread that got flagged for being a dupe: They absolutely stake out moral positions on issues like this all the time. The difference is they only do it in the West where rule of law prevails and they can actually exert influence. They've done it with various anti-LGBT efforts that have taken place around the US, they've done it with the fight with the FBI and they're doing it right now in Australia [1], among others. What they don't do is shoot themselves in the head in some misguided attempt at ideological purity. Also this seems absurd to me: >The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China. It hasn’t tested the public’s immense love of its products. It hasn’t publicly threatened any long-term consequences — like looking to other parts of the world to manufacture its products. If China's authoritarian regime is objectionable then do what countries have always done in history: isolate them economically, diplomatically or politically. Try to foment and support an insurgency or revolution or just invade them yourselves. I'm not sure anyone is willing to risk nuclear war to bring democracy to China but those are your options. Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-talks-australian-government-encryption/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-talks-australian-...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  The big issue is that they'd actually have to shoot themselves in the head: they can't exist in China without giving into things like this. And Tim Cook can't keep his job if he decides to leave his 1st (or 2nd, depending on the quarter) largest market for moral reasons. I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.
  - justicezyx 9y ago
    > Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences. Do you mind point some examples?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Ya, for the big one, Baidu is the ultimate search engine for porn and health care scams, where they used to derive most of their revenue. Compared to Chinese Bing which is pretty clean with pretty effective porn filters (but also makes almost no money). Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that. All the western companies pay income tax on private health insurance benefits, while all the Chinese companies don't, because the law is unclear.
      - hellbanner 9y ago
        I'm familiar with users searching for porn but not health care scams. Are you saying that Baidu was directing traffic to health care scams willingly? Interesting remark on AliPay & WePay. I wonder what kind of agreements Chinese gov made with those companies after the fact. Here's as good as any point to remember that a warrant canary disappeared from Apple's privacy text about a year ago. Before it was about "we will protect user's privacy".. then there was a big "privacy" announcement that had text about following the law etc. IMHO gov got to them and it's understandable - companies exist in frameworks set by governments. It's in Apple's best interest to comply with them. To suggest otherwise is a political stance, not an economic one.
bmc7505 9y ago
As much as I dislike Apple, they made the right choice here. While it may be easy to praise Apple's stance against FBI backdooring the iPhone's secure boot and condemn their compliance with removing VPN apps from the Chinese app store, the latter policy is completely unlike the former for several good reasons. With the Chinese market, you need to choose your battles. Removing VPN apps from the Appstore does not compromise the privacy of any Apple users, and does not prevent existing users of these apps from continuing to use them on their devices. I would imagine Cook fought pretty hard to protect the privacy of Apple users to get this concession from the Chinese censors. For comparison, on Android, China is forcing users in Muslim regions to install apps that scan for "terrorist content" and track user activity. https://thinkprogress.org/china-muslim-surveillance-policy-c0ee4721882b https://thinkprogress.org/china-muslim-surveillance-policy-c...
- jakelazaroff 9y ago
  Agreed. I'll venture that it's still wrong to prevent access to VPNs (divide the blame up however you'd like) but likening this to the FBI backdoor request is an enormous false equivalence.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    You also don't know what the other options were. Banning VPN apps is a better response than only allowing compromised VPN clients.
    - mtgx 9y ago
      > Banning VPN apps is a better response than only allowing compromised VPN clients True. But China is doing both. It's only allowing VPNs that are compromised. So if you are somehow still surprised that you can use a VPN in China after the dust settles, you should know that VPN is likely compromised in China.
- mtgx 9y ago
  > Removing VPN apps from the Appstore does not compromise the privacy of any Apple users That's such BS. VPN apps are banned because they give users privacy. So it's logical that by removing them it hurts people's privacy in China. > and does not prevent existing users of these apps from continuing to use them on their devices. And that's a copout and you know it. As soon as people reset their phones or buy new ones they won't be able to "continue using them". Taking that as a "win" is absurd.
the_common_man 9y ago
Absurd article. Why is this special to Apple? Why can US govt not take a stance and ban all chinese articles from their country?
- 0xbear 9y ago
  That'd be very bad for business. The government is particularly hypocritical in this regard. Our BFFs in the Middle East _execute gays_, oppress women, and finance terrorism, and we pretend not to notice.
sriku 9y ago
Apple stood for privacy in the US where privacy is part of law. It didn't stand by privacy in China where privacy in some forms is prohibited as part of law. Asserting the US law in China would discount China's sovereignty, implicitly declaring "your principles are inferior to ours". A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them. Even in the US where "privacy" is part of law, the legal system recently ruled that Facebook can continue to track users online even when they're logged out. So pretending that the privacy issue is one of "morality" is just borrowing the emotional power of the "morality" label for something that is not a universal law on the planet ... not even within aspects of the US. It is not different from a middle-eastern global company offering christmas discounts for its products in western countries, or Amazon not selling banned books in the countries they operate, or selling books on witchcraft and sorcery as though the books were of the same standing as, say, Principia Mathemtica. Permitted? Do. Not permitted? Don't. ... unless the goal of your company is to champion a particular political ideology. So, frankly, this NYTimes article is, from a global perspective, "politically incorrect".
- Barrin92 9y ago
  exactly. Outsourcing foreign politics or issues of morality to a business is both harmful (because that's arguably not what a company's task is or ought to be) and it circumvents Chinese law. If issues of privacy in China are very important to you electing officials who's foreign policy reflects that is a better idea.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    that's arguably not what a company's task is or ought to be Ok, argue it. Why should a company, as a member of the society it's based in, be above criticism for taking immoral actions just because they happen somewhere else? And does that apply to any immoral action, or do you draw a line?
    - jimmywanger 9y ago
      > And does that apply to any immoral action, or do you draw a line? You're arguing in circles here. Immoral is in the eye of the beholder, culturally, so by defining something as "immoral" you're just labelling it as "bad" and asking somebody to justify decisions. That's a loaded question and a cheap rhetorical technique. You could make an argument that since most governed people in China don't mind that they have limited freedom of speech, there is nothing immoral about it. It's not like there are riots breaking out in the streets often
MVf4l 9y ago
I won't call obeying local laws or following host's rules sets precedent. MNCs have been following the local rules since day one. What do you expect? Would you stop speaking local language because it helps the rulers communicate? Would you stop using the bank notes because it's issued by a dictatorship? You didn't because it's essential to run your business within the country. The US is your own country, you have obligation to fix it, that's why you stand up against FBI. But not for other countries, they have to fix their own country by themselves.
chj 9y ago
I don't think Apple has any other choice, except to open up iOS system so that it doesn't have the responsibility to censor apps. It's interesting to see how Apple's centralized control turns out to be a convenient tool for authoritarian governments.
- Steko 9y ago
  This is the point John Gruber made: To me, the more interesting question isn’t whether Apple should be selling its products in China, but rather whether Apple should continue to make the App Store the only way to install apps on iOS devices. A full-on “install whatever you want” policy isn’t going to happen, but something like Gatekeeper on MacOS could. Keep iOS App Store-only by default. Add a preference in Settings to allow apps to be downloaded from “identified developers” (those with an Apple developer certificate) in addition to the App Store. In that scenario, the App Store is no longer a single choke point for all native apps on the device. The App Store was envisioned as a means for Apple to maintain strict control over the software running on iOS devices. But in a totalitarian state like China (or perhaps Russia, next), it becomes a source of control for the totalitarian regime. I don’t expect Apple to do this. They’d rather deal with the negative consequences of the App Store as a choke point than give up the benefits (including the profits) of maintaining complete control over all software on the platform.1 But if you’re angry about Apple’s role in this VPN crackdown in China, I suggest you direct your anger at the App Store as the single source for third-party software.
  - Inconel 9y ago
    As someone who just recently started using an iOS device and finds the lack of sideloading mildly annoying, can anyone with some expertise in iOS security chime in with whether or not allowing sideloading of apps on iOS represents any serious security implications for iPhones? From my admittedly amateurish understanding, iOS sandboxing is significantly more robust than Android, is this just a way for Apple to maintain total control of, and profit off of, apps, or does this policy have a basis in security as well?
    - 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
Why does a western moral standard give Apple the right to break Chinese law? Where do you draw that line? What US laws are ok to break? Should Apple export other US laws like labor standards? If so, Alabama or California law? Like it or not, globalism means that we're participants in a huge global community. Part of being in a community is respecting your neighbors, even when you disagree with them.
- maus42 9y ago
  As many others commented elsewhere, moral relativism is not very robust ethical system in a global community. If you ever have kids, why would you teach them some morals over others? Would you teach that some moral standard (pick any! say, "it's not generally okay to steal others' stuff") would just stop by the virtue that they just happen move to different jurisdiction where the government is not interested in e.g. property rights? Or it is okay that just the natives of Thiefmark have their stuff stolen by others? Can you go and take their stuff with you to Hobbiton, given they live in Thiefmark and King Thiofden is not going to punish you for that? What if the raiders of Rohan move to your neighborhood? This is a different issue whether it makes sense or is productive in the long term to fight against the Chinese law in some particular way. But sensible ethical systems are universal.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    I don't disagree, but I won't walk into the home of an acquaintance and tell him why he's wrong either. There's obviously a line there. But a computer company isn't going to win against a police state.
partisan 9y ago
The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. There is nothing Apple can do. In the name of profits, they have put their entire business in the hands of the Chinese government.
- differentView 9y ago
  >The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. That's just silly. Foxconn would do nothing of the sort.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    They would if the Chinese government ordered them to as a retaliatory measure. I'm sure that wasn't off the table when they were discussing it.
  - partisan 9y ago
    I don't know if it is just silly. Their IP is in the wind. The third shift is a real phenomenon for brands manufacturing in China even under good circumstances. I am simply extrapolating from that reality.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Also, China is 1/3 of their sales. It's not only profits but probably long term survival.
bpodgursky 9y ago
Does anyone here think China is more free or informed because Google held a hard line and got banned?
Veratyr 9y ago
It makes no sense for Apple to do anything but comply. Its only real options are to manipulate corrupt government officials (which is against US law) or leave and: - There are plenty of competitors in China and its people will continue to be well served by them should Apple choose to leave. - The people of China aren't going to benefit at all from any Apple departure. - Apple is a publicly traded company; its duty is to its shareholders. 20% of Apple's Q2 17 revenue came from China: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q2FY17DataSummary.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q2FY17DataSummary.pdf So leaving is also not an option, an attempt to do so would be pointless and crater the stock so bad investors would revolt. The article suggests a "public fight" but that seems incredibly naïve to me. China just doesn't work that way. The fight was lost when the GFW went up.
bangonkeyboard 9y ago
When China next tells Apple to backdoor iMessage encryption, the question is not whether Apple will cooperate, but how the public will ever find out that they had.
AndyMcConachie 9y ago
What dangerous precedent? That Apple is a company that is governed by the rule of law? I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits. I'd certainly like them to do more than that, but I don't have the expectation that they will. And expecting them to break the law, or leave the Chinese market, is simply just crazy. It sucks that China treats its citizens in this manner, but I plan on abiding by Chinese law the next time I'm in China or I wouldn't go. Why should Apple be any different, and why is this somehow their fault?
- maus42 9y ago
  >I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits. There is difference between what we can realistically expect people to do (often, not much, and even after accounting for that, still disappoint) and what they should do and we should expect them do (do what is right). To continue with the illustrative examples from fiction. Nobody expects Theoden to do much anything useful after listening to all that poison of pouring out of mouth of the Wormtongue. But is it what he should be doing?
csense 9y ago
This is only possible because Apple has a "walled garden" app store and doesn't let people install stuff from outside it. The solution is simple: Publish an official jailbreak allowing expert iPhone users to root their phones and use third-party app stores. Then Apple's not violating Chinese law by directly providing VPN's, instead they're removing themselves from a situation where they're in a position to be capable of enforcing Chinese law. The user is free to install whatever they want on a device they've bought.
- millstone 9y ago
  Is this actually necessary? You can install a VPN profile on your iPhone by manually typing in the settings, without going through the App Store.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    If that VPN profile is limited to well-known VPN protocols, there is no possible combination of settings that gets you past the Great Firewall, a VPN app needs to add their own or it won't work.
mstaoru 9y ago
Privacy concerns aside, without running VPN half of the "allowed" (i.e. not explicitly banned) Western Internet is completely unusable thanks to Google CDN, Google Fonts, Facebook Retargeting, Twitter panels etc. any of which stall the loading forever and the content never shows in Safari / Mobile Chrome. Many hybrid apps are unusable as well. Thankfully they didn't remove manual VPN configuration. Just made it all even more inconvenient.
npunt 9y ago
Worth pointing out that this happened on the same day that TestFlight increases the number of beta testers from 2k to 10k. If someone open sources an iOS VPN app, you've now got 10k people that can sideload an app via the efforts of a single person with an apple developer account. Obviously this is a loophole and not meant as a mainstream solution, but past solutions to getting around the great firewall (including VPN itself) have also been only for the technically informed and connected - often foreigners working in China. Basically it lets the technical elite have a way around the firewall to keep business running. Personally I think it's unlikely these two bits of news are connected (upping testflight is likely about iOS 11), but still it may have a positive effect until it, too, is clamped down on.
- prewett 9y ago
  I think anyone can download Xcode and compile to their device, so there's nothing stopping an open-source VPN app.
  - npunt 9y ago
    True, and really there's always some kind of super-high friction loophole in computing. For these types of loopholes to have an impact though a) people have to know about them, b) people have to be able to do them, and c) they have to be easy to do. TestFlight is as easy as getting an email, downloading the testflight app, and downloading the app you need. Its a trivial amount of steps, which makes it a powerful loophole.
mcappleton 9y ago
I would hardly consider this "setting a precedent", given the fact that this is standard practice for the Chinese government and any company who works there.
bad_user 9y ago
The fanboyism here is staggering.
prewett 9y ago
Is this a news piece or an opinion piece? The article is terrible. Apple has two choices: comply with the laws of China when operating in China or not operate in China. They can refuse to comply on principle, get kicked out of China, and get sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty. They can use all available means (none) to fight it. Or they can obey the laws of the country they are operating in. I bet the author would take a dim view of a Chinese company refusing to obey an American law in America.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >get sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty This canard is never an inviolate rule on how large corporations act. Each company acts differently in regards to so-called "fiduciary duty." Not all must maximize all opportunity to make money by sacrificing everything.
- sangnoir 9y ago
  Large American tech company leaving China is not without precedent: Google left China not too long ago and there were no shareholder lawsuits. "Fiduciary duty" is the hand-wringers' answer to difficult moral questions. It turns out those principles were not principles at all; just artful marketing.
- int_19h 9y ago
  It's not just about Apple. Apple is still headquartered in US. Thus, it's also a moral quandary for US, because American lawmakers can make it a more stark choice for Apple: they can pass a law saying that no American company can aid and abet human rights violations. Then the choice for Apple would be to operate in China and comply with laws of China, or operate in US and comply with laws of US. Is that too extreme? In this case, perhaps (or perhaps not!), but where is the boundary? We all remember how IBM helped implement Holocaust. I don't think anyone would argue that if someone wanted to do something like that today (say, use machine learning to identify closet atheists and gays in Saudi Arabia?), we'd just say "Oh well, they're just operating under these laws, and who are we to judge? It's all culturally relative anyway." So, at some point we draw a line and say, "no, you can't do this, not if you want to be present in our society". Where is that line? And why shouldn't it lie at authoritarian government censoring political speech?
ksk 9y ago
Wow, this is quite a ridiculous article. >When Apple took a public stand for its users’ liberty and privacy, the American government blinked. Nope. They got access via other means, and didn't need Apple's help. >While American tech companies frequently criticize decisions by American officials, they appear loath to do so in China. Do you also expect a Bulgarian company to comment on Sri Lankan politics just because they're doing business there? Its not wrong to feel for citizens of another country, but that is a personal matter. I don't see why a corporation should be meddling in the internal politics of another country. To the author: Have the US tech companies stopped dealing with the NSA and the CIA? Has the CIA given up their backdoor access to Google/FB/MS/Apple/Oracle/etc?
shmerl 9y ago
Money talks, human rights walks.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Without a minimum threshold of money and power you can't maintain human rights, let alone turn them into international norms.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Isn't it the opposite case here? Lot's of power and money involved, while human rights are violated.
gigatexal 9y ago
Who do people think Apple is? A saint? a 501(c)? an NGO? No, they are a multi-national profit maximizing corporation that sees not capitalizing on the growing middle class of China as an existential threat. So while the restrictions that the People's Republic of China (sic) imposes on it's citizens are reprehensible it is a place where Apple must abide by the rules if it wants to sell phones and other hardware and services.
skc 9y ago
I don't know why people that love Apple find it so hard to admit that ultimately Apple first and foremost care about money. (And that's ok!) That's _all_ that this issue is about at the end of the day.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
Lets assume that censorship for any given tech is allready existing and tight. That means censorship only will struggle when new tech arrives and deploys to fast. This means, most vital for the fight against censorship is actually the development of new tech that is censorship resistant. This means tech that is not of the walled garden variety- tech that allows users to chose other severs, circumvent the defaults, allows users to run a local service instead of a centralized server. Tech that allows to draw copys of softwar without central registration. Apple by beeing apple does harm to free speach right there. The VPN removal is just the cherry on top.
- d33 9y ago
  > Lets assume that censorship for any given tech is allready existing and tight. That's an interesting assumption, though one could argue otherwise. How did you come up with this reasoning?
nabla9 9y ago
Apple's silence reflects the cynicism of consumers that buy Apple products. Apple is mainly selling a brand and not a product. Apple is archetypal emotional brand. It's intimate with its customers and it is loved. As most global companies, Apple as a company has no morals. It takes moral stance when it's builds up the brand without hurting the sales. Only way to make Apple to sacrifice something is to threaten the brand and make Apple users feel dirty. More stories like this. People must stop loving and identifying with brands. All brands.
johnsmith21006 9y ago
Interesting contrast to Google deciding to leave China. Apple has also chosen to use a China gov controlled cloud provider.
ksec 9y ago
The latest data have Apple nearly dropping out of the Top 5 handset vendor. May be it should be the Top 4 vendor to complain first ?

210 points by tysone 9y ago

VPN apps are completely different than what happened with the FBI unlocking request last year.

Easy for China to threaten seizure of Apple's manufacturing capabilities. Shareholders won't like that. When something doesn't make sense, follow the money.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
China would probably never go that far. At best, they would just cut off the retail market in China and leave it completely to the 黄牛 yellow cow scalpers like it was 10+ years ago.

cletus 9y ago

Good advice I got once: not every surface is a slippery slope.

y_u_no_rust 9y ago

I don't see how there's much Apple can do here they are a technology company not a world power

IBM 9y ago

I'll repost my comment from the other thread that got flagged for being a dupe: They absolutely stake out moral positions on issues like this all the time. The difference is they only do it in the West where rule of law prevails and they can actually exert influence. They've done it with various anti-LGBT efforts that have taken place around the US, they've done it with the fight with the FBI and they're doing it right now in Australia [1], among others. What they don't do is shoot themselves in the head in some misguided attempt at ideological purity. Also this seems absurd to me: >The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China. It hasn’t tested the public’s immense love of its products. It hasn’t publicly threatened any long-term consequences — like looking to other parts of the world to manufacture its products. If China's authoritarian regime is objectionable then do what countries have always done in history: isolate them economically, diplomatically or politically. Try to foment and support an insurgency or revolution or just invade them yourselves. I'm not sure anyone is willing to risk nuclear war to bring democracy to China but those are your options. Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-talks-australian-government-encryption/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-talks-australian-...

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
The big issue is that they'd actually have to shoot themselves in the head: they can't exist in China without giving into things like this. And Tim Cook can't keep his job if he decides to leave his 1st (or 2nd, depending on the quarter) largest market for moral reasons. I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.
- justicezyx 9y ago
  > Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences. Do you mind point some examples?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Ya, for the big one, Baidu is the ultimate search engine for porn and health care scams, where they used to derive most of their revenue. Compared to Chinese Bing which is pretty clean with pretty effective porn filters (but also makes almost no money). Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that. All the western companies pay income tax on private health insurance benefits, while all the Chinese companies don't, because the law is unclear.
    - hellbanner 9y ago
      I'm familiar with users searching for porn but not health care scams. Are you saying that Baidu was directing traffic to health care scams willingly? Interesting remark on AliPay & WePay. I wonder what kind of agreements Chinese gov made with those companies after the fact. Here's as good as any point to remember that a warrant canary disappeared from Apple's privacy text about a year ago. Before it was about "we will protect user's privacy".. then there was a big "privacy" announcement that had text about following the law etc. IMHO gov got to them and it's understandable - companies exist in frameworks set by governments. It's in Apple's best interest to comply with them. To suggest otherwise is a political stance, not an economic one.

bmc7505 9y ago

As much as I dislike Apple, they made the right choice here. While it may be easy to praise Apple's stance against FBI backdooring the iPhone's secure boot and condemn their compliance with removing VPN apps from the Chinese app store, the latter policy is completely unlike the former for several good reasons. With the Chinese market, you need to choose your battles. Removing VPN apps from the Appstore does not compromise the privacy of any Apple users, and does not prevent existing users of these apps from continuing to use them on their devices. I would imagine Cook fought pretty hard to protect the privacy of Apple users to get this concession from the Chinese censors. For comparison, on Android, China is forcing users in Muslim regions to install apps that scan for "terrorist content" and track user activity. https://thinkprogress.org/china-muslim-surveillance-policy-c0ee4721882b https://thinkprogress.org/china-muslim-surveillance-policy-c...

jakelazaroff 9y ago
Agreed. I'll venture that it's still wrong to prevent access to VPNs (divide the blame up however you'd like) but likening this to the FBI backdoor request is an enormous false equivalence.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  You also don't know what the other options were. Banning VPN apps is a better response than only allowing compromised VPN clients.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    > Banning VPN apps is a better response than only allowing compromised VPN clients True. But China is doing both. It's only allowing VPNs that are compromised. So if you are somehow still surprised that you can use a VPN in China after the dust settles, you should know that VPN is likely compromised in China.
mtgx 9y ago
> Removing VPN apps from the Appstore does not compromise the privacy of any Apple users That's such BS. VPN apps are banned because they give users privacy. So it's logical that by removing them it hurts people's privacy in China. > and does not prevent existing users of these apps from continuing to use them on their devices. And that's a copout and you know it. As soon as people reset their phones or buy new ones they won't be able to "continue using them". Taking that as a "win" is absurd.

the_common_man 9y ago

Absurd article. Why is this special to Apple? Why can US govt not take a stance and ban all chinese articles from their country?

0xbear 9y ago
That'd be very bad for business. The government is particularly hypocritical in this regard. Our BFFs in the Middle East _execute gays_, oppress women, and finance terrorism, and we pretend not to notice.

sriku 9y ago

Apple stood for privacy in the US where privacy is part of law. It didn't stand by privacy in China where privacy in some forms is prohibited as part of law. Asserting the US law in China would discount China's sovereignty, implicitly declaring "your principles are inferior to ours". A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them. Even in the US where "privacy" is part of law, the legal system recently ruled that Facebook can continue to track users online even when they're logged out. So pretending that the privacy issue is one of "morality" is just borrowing the emotional power of the "morality" label for something that is not a universal law on the planet ... not even within aspects of the US. It is not different from a middle-eastern global company offering christmas discounts for its products in western countries, or Amazon not selling banned books in the countries they operate, or selling books on witchcraft and sorcery as though the books were of the same standing as, say, Principia Mathemtica. Permitted? Do. Not permitted? Don't. ... unless the goal of your company is to champion a particular political ideology. So, frankly, this NYTimes article is, from a global perspective, "politically incorrect".

Barrin92 9y ago
exactly. Outsourcing foreign politics or issues of morality to a business is both harmful (because that's arguably not what a company's task is or ought to be) and it circumvents Chinese law. If issues of privacy in China are very important to you electing officials who's foreign policy reflects that is a better idea.
- icebraining 9y ago
  that's arguably not what a company's task is or ought to be Ok, argue it. Why should a company, as a member of the society it's based in, be above criticism for taking immoral actions just because they happen somewhere else? And does that apply to any immoral action, or do you draw a line?
  - jimmywanger 9y ago
    > And does that apply to any immoral action, or do you draw a line? You're arguing in circles here. Immoral is in the eye of the beholder, culturally, so by defining something as "immoral" you're just labelling it as "bad" and asking somebody to justify decisions. That's a loaded question and a cheap rhetorical technique. You could make an argument that since most governed people in China don't mind that they have limited freedom of speech, there is nothing immoral about it. It's not like there are riots breaking out in the streets often

MVf4l 9y ago

I won't call obeying local laws or following host's rules sets precedent. MNCs have been following the local rules since day one. What do you expect? Would you stop speaking local language because it helps the rulers communicate? Would you stop using the bank notes because it's issued by a dictatorship? You didn't because it's essential to run your business within the country. The US is your own country, you have obligation to fix it, that's why you stand up against FBI. But not for other countries, they have to fix their own country by themselves.

chj 9y ago

I don't think Apple has any other choice, except to open up iOS system so that it doesn't have the responsibility to censor apps. It's interesting to see how Apple's centralized control turns out to be a convenient tool for authoritarian governments.

Steko 9y ago
This is the point John Gruber made: To me, the more interesting question isn’t whether Apple should be selling its products in China, but rather whether Apple should continue to make the App Store the only way to install apps on iOS devices. A full-on “install whatever you want” policy isn’t going to happen, but something like Gatekeeper on MacOS could. Keep iOS App Store-only by default. Add a preference in Settings to allow apps to be downloaded from “identified developers” (those with an Apple developer certificate) in addition to the App Store. In that scenario, the App Store is no longer a single choke point for all native apps on the device. The App Store was envisioned as a means for Apple to maintain strict control over the software running on iOS devices. But in a totalitarian state like China (or perhaps Russia, next), it becomes a source of control for the totalitarian regime. I don’t expect Apple to do this. They’d rather deal with the negative consequences of the App Store as a choke point than give up the benefits (including the profits) of maintaining complete control over all software on the platform.1 But if you’re angry about Apple’s role in this VPN crackdown in China, I suggest you direct your anger at the App Store as the single source for third-party software.
- Inconel 9y ago
  As someone who just recently started using an iOS device and finds the lack of sideloading mildly annoying, can anyone with some expertise in iOS security chime in with whether or not allowing sideloading of apps on iOS represents any serious security implications for iPhones? From my admittedly amateurish understanding, iOS sandboxing is significantly more robust than Android, is this just a way for Apple to maintain total control of, and profit off of, apps, or does this policy have a basis in security as well?
  - 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

Why does a western moral standard give Apple the right to break Chinese law? Where do you draw that line? What US laws are ok to break? Should Apple export other US laws like labor standards? If so, Alabama or California law? Like it or not, globalism means that we're participants in a huge global community. Part of being in a community is respecting your neighbors, even when you disagree with them.

maus42 9y ago
As many others commented elsewhere, moral relativism is not very robust ethical system in a global community. If you ever have kids, why would you teach them some morals over others? Would you teach that some moral standard (pick any! say, "it's not generally okay to steal others' stuff") would just stop by the virtue that they just happen move to different jurisdiction where the government is not interested in e.g. property rights? Or it is okay that just the natives of Thiefmark have their stuff stolen by others? Can you go and take their stuff with you to Hobbiton, given they live in Thiefmark and King Thiofden is not going to punish you for that? What if the raiders of Rohan move to your neighborhood? This is a different issue whether it makes sense or is productive in the long term to fight against the Chinese law in some particular way. But sensible ethical systems are universal.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but I won't walk into the home of an acquaintance and tell him why he's wrong either. There's obviously a line there. But a computer company isn't going to win against a police state.

partisan 9y ago

The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. There is nothing Apple can do. In the name of profits, they have put their entire business in the hands of the Chinese government.

differentView 9y ago
>The day after Apple stands up to the Chinese government, Foxconn will be producing phones that no longer have the Apple logo, but will otherwise be Apple iPhones. That's just silly. Foxconn would do nothing of the sort.
- Clubber 9y ago
  They would if the Chinese government ordered them to as a retaliatory measure. I'm sure that wasn't off the table when they were discussing it.
- partisan 9y ago
  I don't know if it is just silly. Their IP is in the wind. The third shift is a real phenomenon for brands manufacturing in China even under good circumstances. I am simply extrapolating from that reality.
Clubber 9y ago
Also, China is 1/3 of their sales. It's not only profits but probably long term survival.

bpodgursky 9y ago

Does anyone here think China is more free or informed because Google held a hard line and got banned?

Veratyr 9y ago

It makes no sense for Apple to do anything but comply. Its only real options are to manipulate corrupt government officials (which is against US law) or leave and: - There are plenty of competitors in China and its people will continue to be well served by them should Apple choose to leave. - The people of China aren't going to benefit at all from any Apple departure. - Apple is a publicly traded company; its duty is to its shareholders. 20% of Apple's Q2 17 revenue came from China: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q2FY17DataSummary.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q2FY17DataSummary.pdf So leaving is also not an option, an attempt to do so would be pointless and crater the stock so bad investors would revolt. The article suggests a "public fight" but that seems incredibly naïve to me. China just doesn't work that way. The fight was lost when the GFW went up.

bangonkeyboard 9y ago

When China next tells Apple to backdoor iMessage encryption, the question is not whether Apple will cooperate, but how the public will ever find out that they had.

AndyMcConachie 9y ago

What dangerous precedent? That Apple is a company that is governed by the rule of law? I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits. I'd certainly like them to do more than that, but I don't have the expectation that they will. And expecting them to break the law, or leave the Chinese market, is simply just crazy. It sucks that China treats its citizens in this manner, but I plan on abiding by Chinese law the next time I'm in China or I wouldn't go. Why should Apple be any different, and why is this somehow their fault?

maus42 9y ago
>I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits. There is difference between what we can realistically expect people to do (often, not much, and even after accounting for that, still disappoint) and what they should do and we should expect them do (do what is right). To continue with the illustrative examples from fiction. Nobody expects Theoden to do much anything useful after listening to all that poison of pouring out of mouth of the Wormtongue. But is it what he should be doing?

csense 9y ago

This is only possible because Apple has a "walled garden" app store and doesn't let people install stuff from outside it. The solution is simple: Publish an official jailbreak allowing expert iPhone users to root their phones and use third-party app stores. Then Apple's not violating Chinese law by directly providing VPN's, instead they're removing themselves from a situation where they're in a position to be capable of enforcing Chinese law. The user is free to install whatever they want on a device they've bought.

millstone 9y ago
Is this actually necessary? You can install a VPN profile on your iPhone by manually typing in the settings, without going through the App Store.
- yorwba 9y ago
  If that VPN profile is limited to well-known VPN protocols, there is no possible combination of settings that gets you past the Great Firewall, a VPN app needs to add their own or it won't work.

mstaoru 9y ago

Privacy concerns aside, without running VPN half of the "allowed" (i.e. not explicitly banned) Western Internet is completely unusable thanks to Google CDN, Google Fonts, Facebook Retargeting, Twitter panels etc. any of which stall the loading forever and the content never shows in Safari / Mobile Chrome. Many hybrid apps are unusable as well. Thankfully they didn't remove manual VPN configuration. Just made it all even more inconvenient.

npunt 9y ago

Worth pointing out that this happened on the same day that TestFlight increases the number of beta testers from 2k to 10k. If someone open sources an iOS VPN app, you've now got 10k people that can sideload an app via the efforts of a single person with an apple developer account. Obviously this is a loophole and not meant as a mainstream solution, but past solutions to getting around the great firewall (including VPN itself) have also been only for the technically informed and connected - often foreigners working in China. Basically it lets the technical elite have a way around the firewall to keep business running. Personally I think it's unlikely these two bits of news are connected (upping testflight is likely about iOS 11), but still it may have a positive effect until it, too, is clamped down on.

prewett 9y ago
I think anyone can download Xcode and compile to their device, so there's nothing stopping an open-source VPN app.
- npunt 9y ago
  True, and really there's always some kind of super-high friction loophole in computing. For these types of loopholes to have an impact though a) people have to know about them, b) people have to be able to do them, and c) they have to be easy to do. TestFlight is as easy as getting an email, downloading the testflight app, and downloading the app you need. Its a trivial amount of steps, which makes it a powerful loophole.

mcappleton 9y ago

I would hardly consider this "setting a precedent", given the fact that this is standard practice for the Chinese government and any company who works there.

bad_user 9y ago

The fanboyism here is staggering.

prewett 9y ago

Is this a news piece or an opinion piece? The article is terrible. Apple has two choices: comply with the laws of China when operating in China or not operate in China. They can refuse to comply on principle, get kicked out of China, and get sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty. They can use all available means (none) to fight it. Or they can obey the laws of the country they are operating in. I bet the author would take a dim view of a Chinese company refusing to obey an American law in America.

icelancer 9y ago
>get sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty This canard is never an inviolate rule on how large corporations act. Each company acts differently in regards to so-called "fiduciary duty." Not all must maximize all opportunity to make money by sacrificing everything.
sangnoir 9y ago
Large American tech company leaving China is not without precedent: Google left China not too long ago and there were no shareholder lawsuits. "Fiduciary duty" is the hand-wringers' answer to difficult moral questions. It turns out those principles were not principles at all; just artful marketing.
int_19h 9y ago
It's not just about Apple. Apple is still headquartered in US. Thus, it's also a moral quandary for US, because American lawmakers can make it a more stark choice for Apple: they can pass a law saying that no American company can aid and abet human rights violations. Then the choice for Apple would be to operate in China and comply with laws of China, or operate in US and comply with laws of US. Is that too extreme? In this case, perhaps (or perhaps not!), but where is the boundary? We all remember how IBM helped implement Holocaust. I don't think anyone would argue that if someone wanted to do something like that today (say, use machine learning to identify closet atheists and gays in Saudi Arabia?), we'd just say "Oh well, they're just operating under these laws, and who are we to judge? It's all culturally relative anyway." So, at some point we draw a line and say, "no, you can't do this, not if you want to be present in our society". Where is that line? And why shouldn't it lie at authoritarian government censoring political speech?

ksk 9y ago

Wow, this is quite a ridiculous article. >When Apple took a public stand for its users’ liberty and privacy, the American government blinked. Nope. They got access via other means, and didn't need Apple's help. >While American tech companies frequently criticize decisions by American officials, they appear loath to do so in China. Do you also expect a Bulgarian company to comment on Sri Lankan politics just because they're doing business there? Its not wrong to feel for citizens of another country, but that is a personal matter. I don't see why a corporation should be meddling in the internal politics of another country. To the author: Have the US tech companies stopped dealing with the NSA and the CIA? Has the CIA given up their backdoor access to Google/FB/MS/Apple/Oracle/etc?

shmerl 9y ago

Money talks, human rights walks.

Bakary 9y ago
Without a minimum threshold of money and power you can't maintain human rights, let alone turn them into international norms.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Isn't it the opposite case here? Lot's of power and money involved, while human rights are violated.

gigatexal 9y ago

Who do people think Apple is? A saint? a 501(c)? an NGO? No, they are a multi-national profit maximizing corporation that sees not capitalizing on the growing middle class of China as an existential threat. So while the restrictions that the People's Republic of China (sic) imposes on it's citizens are reprehensible it is a place where Apple must abide by the rules if it wants to sell phones and other hardware and services.

skc 9y ago

I don't know why people that love Apple find it so hard to admit that ultimately Apple first and foremost care about money. (And that's ok!) That's _all_ that this issue is about at the end of the day.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

Lets assume that censorship for any given tech is allready existing and tight. That means censorship only will struggle when new tech arrives and deploys to fast. This means, most vital for the fight against censorship is actually the development of new tech that is censorship resistant. This means tech that is not of the walled garden variety- tech that allows users to chose other severs, circumvent the defaults, allows users to run a local service instead of a centralized server. Tech that allows to draw copys of softwar without central registration. Apple by beeing apple does harm to free speach right there. The VPN removal is just the cherry on top.

d33 9y ago
> Lets assume that censorship for any given tech is allready existing and tight. That's an interesting assumption, though one could argue otherwise. How did you come up with this reasoning?

nabla9 9y ago

Apple's silence reflects the cynicism of consumers that buy Apple products. Apple is mainly selling a brand and not a product. Apple is archetypal emotional brand. It's intimate with its customers and it is loved. As most global companies, Apple as a company has no morals. It takes moral stance when it's builds up the brand without hurting the sales. Only way to make Apple to sacrifice something is to threaten the brand and make Apple users feel dirty. More stories like this. People must stop loving and identifying with brands. All brands.

johnsmith21006 9y ago

Interesting contrast to Google deciding to leave China. Apple has also chosen to use a China gov controlled cloud provider.

ksec 9y ago

The latest data have Apple nearly dropping out of the Top 5 handset vendor. May be it should be the Top 4 vendor to complain first ?