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Apple Censoring the News App
- hello_friendos 8y agoWhy pretend like China isn't the one censoring this.
- threatofrain 8y agoIt takes two to tango here.
- dkonofalski 8y agoNot really. They can't do business in China if they don't follow their laws.
- criley2 8y ago"Just following orders" is a terrible rationalization for doing bad things.
- denzil_correa 8y agoWhat's the alternative recommendation for Apple?
- floren 8y agoI'd respect them more if they refused to do business in China. Not good for the company, sure, but it'd give me warm fuzzies.
- acdha 8y agoIsn't that something of the nuclear option? Not doing business in China has to be a multi-trillion dollar project duplicating most of the computer assembly industry somewhere else.
- eridius 8y agoIsn't that literally what they're doing with News, though? Apple is doing business in China but Apple News isn't available. They're not censoring news stories or altering them for Chinese audiences, it's simply not available.
- sneak 8y agoThis is a very good point.
- iwasakabukiman 8y agoTo me, it feels as if “just following orders” is a different order of magnitude than disregarding a country’s rules and laws. They might be the same broad concept, but I think it’s a much larger conversation than just following orders. I don’t agree with the decision to censor in China but it feels like an unrealistic comparison to make here.
- criley2 8y ago"is a different order of magnitude than disregarding a country’s rules and laws" Apple seems willing to disregard American laws regarding backdoors, national security, and access to device information. I find it interesting that we're all proud that Apple will "stand up" to the US federal government and resist attacks on privacy and liberties, but then so many turn around justify them doing the exact opposite in China. "Well, when in Rome..." sounds like an awfully convenient rationalization as well.
- Gaelan 8y agoThe US has mechanisms for challenging unjust laws without getting arrested. China doesn’t.
- criley2 8y agoOh, so the tyrannical nature of China makes it just, moral and good to assist in the tyranny?
- mehrdada 8y ago> Apple seems willing to disregard American laws regarding backdoors, national security, and access to device information. Which American law did they disregard? Unilateral opinions from one branch of government are not "laws".
- dkonofalski 8y agoApple hasn't disregarded any US laws. The Constitution specifically protects their ability to act in the ways they did. The Chinese government, however, does not. This isn't an Apples to apples comparison.
- KerrickStaley 8y agoThe issue is that normally, Chinese censorship does not apply to travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM. However, the way Apple implemented censorship for News+ goes beyond the norm, such that even foreign travelers are impacted. It's not a good thing for Apple to be innovating on ways to enforce Chinese censorship (although if I understand correctly, it doesn't matter—China could already censor roaming cell traffic, they just choose not to).
- iliketosleep 8y ago> Chinese censorship does not apply to travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM Really? Travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM are excepted from Chinese censorship laws? I find this very difficult to believe. It's more likely that censorship laws are simply more difficult to enforce on travelers, which doesn't make it any more legal.
- powerapple 8y ago"difficult to believe" leads you to your own conclusion rather than researching on how it works...that's how internet works, sadly
- iliketosleep 8y agoWhile China, even as a tourist, you are still subject to Chinese laws and regulations. Just because a rule isn't always strictly enforced doesn't mean it's nonapplicable. Any unsubstantiated claims to the contrary are "difficult to believe"
- chillacy 8y agoWhen you travel with a US sim all your traffic is routed back to the US first so it’s quite slow, but it is uncensored. Another trick is you can buy prepaid sims in Hong Kong which use the exact same networks but are uncensored so the internet is fast and uncensored. But this route is expensive.
- United857 8y ago
- sgjohnson 8y agoChina is their biggest market. Would be a bit stupid to get your products banned from your biggest market over something so simple. Not that I agree with Chinese practices.
- toastking 8y agoI think it's more that in a device that's so locked down this is a bad precedent. Cowtowing to governments is detrimental for everyone.
- briandear 8y ago> Cowtowing to governments is detrimental for everyone. So should Apple News allow Nazi stories in Germany? Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in a Thailand? Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person in the US? Should Apple pay taxes? Should Apple prohibit child porn? All of these are examples of “kowtowing” to governments. What’s the difference between kowtowing and following the law? How can someone expect Apple to pay a “fair share” of EU taxes but then expect them to not follow Chinese law? If a company boycotts countries based on ideology, pretty soon every country gets boycotted over something or another. There are exactly zero perfect countries.
- cco 8y agoYes, yes, no, yes, yes. That seems fairly easy to navigate, are there harder questions that prove this is a more nuanced question?
- tomhoward 8y agoYet in other contexts (most notably, taxation, labour, environment), we rage against the big tech companies for not obeying laws/norms/decency standards in the countries in which they operate. Companies can simultaneously observe the laws and respect the norms of the countries in which they operate, whilst playing a role in bringing about incremental change over the long term. To do otherwise is some combination of rudeness, irresponsibility or arrogance.
- floren 8y agoInteresting that this was flagged for a minute there but came back. Did the mods manually unflag?
- mishurov 8y agoAs if western countries weren't censoring conservative centrist views.
- Angostura 8y agoI remember back in the day when UK Newsagent WHS Smith kept pulling Private Eye off its shelves if there was content it didn't like.
- acdha 8y ago> To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN. (In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)
- Titanous 8y agoYes, when you use a US carrier roaming in China you have a US IP: >This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.
- acdha 8y agoInteresting. That seems like it'd be horrible for latency but I guess it works well enough that I haven't heard complaints about it.
- deno 8y agoAssuming you’re using it to access websites or services with PoPs in US/EU then tunneling traffic via US/EU VPN would add negligible latency, actually would probably improve your latency overall.
- larrysalibra 8y agoIt is horrible for latency to use a US carrier roaming in China but without an immediate frame of reference people probably don’t notice. Those roaming with us sims are probably mostly accessing us websites so the latency isn’t going to be much different than accessing the site from local Wi-Fi assuming it’s not blocked. Where it really shows is trying to access Chinese sites in China roaming with a us sim. If you want low latency roaming in China, state owned China Mobile will sell you a solution for that: https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/
- malshe 8y agoThe title mentions News+ but the article is all about News App so this is not specific to News+
- sctb 8y agoThanks! We've replaced that in the headline here.
- enitihas 8y agoGoogle gets a whole different level of scrutiny on HN wrt their business practices than any other company it seems. Apple can do whatever the Chinese government asks, yet almost all comments in this thread are aimed at justifying their innocence using business and sovereignty arguments. However, the yet to launch dragonfly project gets huge opposition. Are there any other companies getting the same level of scrutiny.
- criddell 8y ago> Google gets a whole different level of scrutiny on HN wrt their business practices In part, it's because Google's business practices involve collecting all the information they can on users. I don't spend much time worrying about China (or other governments for that matter), but if I did, Google and Facebook would top my list of companies that I would be critical of.
- Pharmakon 8y agoI’m pretty sure that if Apple had Google’s privacy-busting business model they’d be loathed too. If as a bonus they also worked on drones with the Pentagon you’d have even more hate. As it stands I’m yet to see an Apple article here that isn’t filled with people talking about the “Apple tax” and trying to define them as a monopoly.
- enitihas 8y agoMicrosoft works with the DOD and gets minimal scrutiny. Also all the posts about apple tax also have similar number of posts talking about the google tax, even though google atleast allows people to download apks and install, like the route fortnite took.
- Pharmakon 8y agoMicrosoft is one of the more loathed companies for what they’ve already done, never mind what they do now. I’m not sure where you’re getting “minimal scrutiny” from, except as another attempt to mitigate an understandable reaction to Google’s “winning” combination of hypocrisy and dominance.
- buboard 8y agoisn't it possible to identify the location from the IP alone?
- jeffrogers 8y agoAny chance this is enforcing a content licensing restriction?
- skywhopper 8y agoThere's not enough information here to think this is a major scandal. Does Apple News respect your home region everywhere in the world except in China? Or is this just the typical international content licensing tarpit? I would blame copyright hell before I would assume Apple is kowtowing to China somehow. Given that China apparently allows foreign mobile devices an exception to the Great Firewall network blocks, it seems unlikely the Chinese government is specifically targeting the Apple News app for being blocked. I'm struggling to see how it makes sense to think of this as "censorship" rather than just "software and content licensing are both complicated and terrible".
- ycombonator 8y agoApple pisses when China growls. I personally think their claim of being privacy guardians is a bunch of PR & marketing BS. Didn’t they also handover the encryption keys for iCloud in China to the Communist Regime ?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jmull 8y agoThese discussions are pretty weird. It's China that is censoring the news here. But for some reason we're mainly blaming Apple for it? It's makes no sense. And what the heck does the API Apple uses to determine location have to do with it? If Apple had the choice, they would use no API to censor the news. Anyway, for the people who really are worried about censorship (I am) it's worth understanding and acknowledging what's actually going on here. This problem is not an Apple problem and if you try to treat it like one, that's actually worse than doing nothing at all since it draws attention away from the actual problem. (There are Apple problems, of course, but this isn't one of them.) This is a big China problem.
- PostOnce 8y agoAlso known as the Nuremberg Defense. Apple is Just Following Orders™ after all. To say it another way, there are multiple parties doing multiple wrongs here.
- jurip 8y agoIt's stretching the Nuremberg definition a bit when you accuse a company of it when they try to have their products follow the laws of the countries where they sell them. I'm sure there's a line in the sand somewhere there but refusing to distribute outlawed publications is surely not over it.
- featherrust 8y agoThe article is about iPhones for the US market, not about iPhones for the Chinese market.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoApple is famous for fighting anything which might associate the brand with a degraded user experience. So shipping an apple branded product which tacitly accepts censorship seems like tacit complicity, which is the most cynical type of complicity.
- 8y ago
- s3r3nity 8y agoChina Censoring Apple's News App FTFY
- saagarjha 8y ago> Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS specifically to improve privacy for users. Regardless of the merit of the argument of Apple censoring News in China, this is a stupid argument. For Apple, there is no private API: they wrote the thing themselves; for privacy they prevent third-party applications from accessing it. What would you like them to do, remove the API entirely or open it to third-party developers?
- black_puppydog 8y agoremove it. there, happy? :)
- saagarjha 8y agoNo, because now my phone doesn't work. I can't send text messages, I can't use most of the hardware, I can't change basic settings…none of these can function without the APIs that Apple currently keeps private. It's obvious that there should be functionality to say set the device's passcode–but it's also pretty clear that normal apps should not be able to access this.
- icyzhao 8y agoI lived in U.S. for eight years and found out about this fact after I came back. It's deeply concerning, the fact they don't block news app but block news feeds in China is weird. I used to use News App with U.S. sim card, but the restriction got tighter and tighter.
- black_puppydog 8y agoPerhaps one day we can stop talking about "feature-gating" (and "geoblocking" for that matter) and just treat these censorship mechanisms as the attacks on the freedom on the web that they are.
- Gorbzel 8y agoThat'd be the best move here. If the author wants Apple to operate according to their (US-based) ideals in China, that's a perfectly valid argument to make. So make it. Instead, the author does some overly verbose and hot take dance to propagate clickbait, which is then shockingly submitted to HN. Call this garbage for what it is.
- sbr464 8y agoThey also censor or at least filter out content they are not comfortable sharing on their iTunes movie platform. I’m not sure how appropriate the word censor is here in this context. They are a private company that can choose which content they release in which area, or at all, especially to adapt to local customs or laws. Similar to how you can get rice and a chicken leg at McDonalds in Indonesia, but can’t in America.
- sricola 8y agoJust noticed in the screen shot that the poster's wifi was on. In which case they had a Chinese IP and it wouldn't work. Did the OP test on cell network only?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]