Or to put it another way: "Apple complies with the laws in the countries where it does business". That said, what you've described is wrong. The data is not "t

Or to put it another way: "Apple complies with the laws in the countries where it does business". That said, what you've described is wrong. The data is not "tapped by default". It was widely reported that Apple now contracts with a Chinese company to provide the data center, as well as stores the cryptographic keys in China. But the data center company doesn't have those keys, Apple does. The important difference here is that China can use their own legal system to compel Apple to hand over the keys for specified users rather than going through the U.S. courts. Presumably this does significantly weaken the protections here (as one can assume China's courts are going to be much more willing to approve government requests for this), but it's not the same thing as "tapped by default" because the Chinese government still needs to go through their own court system to compel access to data on specific users, as opposed to having unfettered access to data on all Chinese users. It also sounds like Apple co-brands iCloud accounts for Chinese users with the name of the Chinese data center provider, so they're not exactly hiding it.