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No, the complaint is not that Cook is not providing direct evidence, and it is a complete misrepresentation to suggest so. It makes your protestations of disint
by stupidcar 7y ago
No, the complaint is not that Cook is not providing direct evidence, and it is a complete misrepresentation to suggest so. It makes your protestations of disinterest rather suspect, as those of supposed "devil's advocates" so often seem to be.
The complaint is that Cook's claims are extraordinary and seemingly impossible on their face because of the fundamental nature of the app in question. Its purpose is to show the aggregated position of large concentrations of police, so as to let users avoid confrontations with them. How can such an app be used to "target individual officers for violence", since it provides no information about individual officers?
When so extraordinary a claim is made, hearsay evidence isn't the issue. What is necessary is an explanation of how the seemingly impossible is possible. Cook does not provide this or even address the apparent problem. A neutral person, reading Cook's memo without the proper background, might be mislead into believing the app in question does provide tracking of individual police officers. I don't accept this is an accident on Cook's part. I think he is deliberately attempting to mislead his own employees regarding the nature of the app, and as a consequence his decision to ban it.
Cook's cited but unenumerated "credible" information received from a government body and users only compounds the situation. Cook could provide plenty of additional material to support his claim. He could provide more detailed information on exactly what information was received, in what volume, and in what form. He could explain the efforts the company undertook to perform independent corroboration of the evidence. He could provide a detailed account of why, in this case, he believes an autocratic government currently conducting a brutal repression of its own citizens can be trusted to communicate honestly about it, given neither it, nor any similar autocratic government, has ever spoken honestly about similar situations in the past.
Fundamentally, the problem isn't whatever evidence does or does not exist. It is that Cook's memo is a weak, politician's attempt to justify a misdeed by making absurd claims for which he provides no evidence at all. He is trying to make a problem go away, not engage with a difficult situation as a human being.
- Aperocky 7y agoI don't understand why people would flag comments as 'suspect', have we reached McCarthyism or the hyper sensitive Chinese level yet? Why is it impossible for people to address the opinions and reasons within a comment specifically without resorting to 'suspecting the motives of the individual'? In other words, why does the motives of the individual matters to you if the opinion expressed within the comments can stand by themselves?
- mistermann 7y agoMaybe because the poster characterized the problem as: "So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app?" Whereas the article says: "The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag. As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this." It could be incompetence, but it seems much more like clear disingenuousness, which is a pretty common thing nowadays.
- unethical_ban 7y agoWhen something is not merely wrong, or foolish, but seems so indicative of failing to comprehend the article, it stands to reason that it may not be in good faith. In other words, the person you responded to specifically stated that the comment CANNOT stand by itself; it supposed things opposite of what was said in the article.
- baddox 7y agoI really did not intend to misrepresent Gruber's complaints. Gruber enumerates his complains quite clearly, and I believe I addressed them quite plainly and fairly. I also don't think that Cook's claims are extraordinary or at all difficult to believe, so perhaps that's the more fundamental disagreement you and I have.
- rdiddly 7y agoNot the same commenter, but it seems like the lengthy protestations of disinterest are a reaction to the prevailing online climate of exactly the kind of paranoid hysteria embodied in, for example, the assertion that anyone playing devil's advocate is probably on the devil's side so to speak. Being able to hold and consider multiple contrary or incompatible positions simultaneously is in fact a sign of a fairly sophisticated intellect in the process of doing a thorough inquiry.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoEven the devil's advocate [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate ] is supposed to cite facts and reason properly -- not claim a falsehood in support of the devil, which misrepresenting the article is. You can't just precede anything with "just playing devil's advocate for a moment" and make it immune from scrutiny, that's the intellectual equivalent of "just a prank". From the WP article, emphasis mine: > explore the thought further using a valid reasoning
- baddox 7y agoI welcome scrutiny, and I disagree with this particular scrutiny.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoI could have just done the same, and just say "I disagree" without making an argument, but that's not really much of a discussion is it.
- dwaite 7y agoI think there may be a misrepresentation here. Apple is not a court of law for Hong Kong, so they did not gather evidence and make a call. IMHO it is far more likely that a representative from the mentioned Hong Kong government agency reached out to ask the app to be removed for the reasons given, and Apple complied with their request. If I'm correct, Apple is taking the supplied information at face value and also as a formal (legal) request. In that light, the reason for the (internal) statement here is due to the press this app already received and because many employees of Apple have a humanitarian interest in Hong Kong - or even have friends and family who live there.