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".
This amount of cultural relativism is silly and frankly just plain ignorant. China doesn't restrict free speech for cultural reasons. The CCP restricts free speech because it fears losing its ruling status.
>Apple is still a US company at the end of the day. If it makes profits from supporting censorship in China, that makes it a US problem.
In what possible way does it make it a US problem?
Besides, western companies make tons of money by selling arms, doing deals, and supporting all kinds of regimes, including the most abhorrent ones, from Pinochet's Chile to S.A.
That means every single nation would have to have its own company in every industry. No US food company would operate in Europe by this standard. And no Chinese Companies should sell anything back to US due to what you just describe.
Apartheid was the result of white western settlers screwing and mistreating over the local black population, after the region got colonized.
This is a single country, with its own culture, history and tradition, minding its own affairs.
And blacks were clearly against apartheid and fighting fiercely for decades. Have you talked to many locals in China and found out they were against their regime?
> Have you talked to many locals in China and found out they were against their regime?
The ones whose opinion would be interesting are in prison, or no longer locals.
There are whole bookshelves of books describing the wholesome family and city life people "on the right side" in Nazi Germany engaged in. They had their pleasures, their had their excuses, and I care not for either. The phrase "whitewashed tombs" comes to mind.
> blacks were clearly against apartheid
Blacks? Or "the blacks"? Because I'm sure I could find you Uncle Toms, there's always some. And since I also could find you people fighting against the Chinese regimes since Mao, the sentence "Chinese were clearly against oppression" would also be correct and we achieved nothing.
Really, the nerve. Did I ask the dead if they are against their regime?
Similarly, as a German I flat out don't care much for people from the GDR who aren't dissing it. I don't care if that was their "culture" (what a totally empty word, it's like a void pointer). They survived it with their blinders intact, and that says something about them, not the GDR. I feel the same way about "the West" before anyone asks, but that doesn't mean I find more backwards tyrannies cute. I don't need to borrow their blind eyes to see what I see, and if I have to be against thousands of them to be for those I HAVE to be for to not spit out when I look in the mirror, so be it. The more, the merrier.
> Have you talked to many locals in China and found out they were against their regime?
I actually have. In fact, every single one that I talked with was against their regime.
The Chinese culture is not the victim here. The "evil whites" are not trying to mess with the eastern cultures in this case. Instead, the Chinese people are the victims, victims of the fascist regime that rules over them.
>And blacks were clearly against apartheid and fighting fiercely for decades. Have you talked to many locals in China and found out they were against their regime?
No, they were all killed decades ago. Why does it matter if it is black vs white or chinese vs chinese? Sounds like a double standard to me.
>Why does it matter if it is black vs white or chinese vs chinese? Sounds like a double standard to me.
Because (a) the whites were colonizers, where Chinese are at home in China. And because in apartheid it was whites against blacks, whereas in China it's not "chinese vs chinese" -- chinese in general LIKE their government.
I don't think the Chinese citizens have a choice about whether they say they like their government or not. The Hundred Flowers Campaign was pretty brutal.
While I agree with attempts to prevent governments from controlling speech, have spent a fair amount of time working on that, and was disturbed by Apple's role here, I don't think the dichotomy you present works as cleanly as you suggest. State power and culture shape and reinforce each other in an extremely complex way.
That's true. I lived in China for a few years and was surprised to find out that most people seemed relatively (if not very) happy with the CCP. Ignorance plays a role but it's mainly that they value economic growth (and therefore, political stability) over anything else. Free speech would be nice but when you go from near starvation to owning a house and a car, you learn what economic growth does and start to value it.
Assuming it was a rhetorical question: I am basing my observation on many private conversations I had over the years (e.g. with my wife). I think most foreigners in China would agree with this as well.
In case your question wasn't rhetorical: nothing would happen. That is, unless you were a very public figure or made it your life's mission. Fun fact: China has a very low incarceration rate, about 15% that of the USA. It's not like people are getting thrown in jail right and left for opening their mouth.
China has a lower incarceration rate, but they also have a higher rate of execution. Even for things like drug trafficking (which most of the US prison population consists of). These stricter punishments surely make people more afraid of breaking the law...and I'm sure many chinese are justifiably afraid of speaking out due to fear of the consequences. So the fact that there is a smaller prisoner population isn't that great when considering there are harsher penalties.
I agree that incarceration rates alone don't paint the whole picture. The "hard pill to swallow" was that Chinese people don't value free speech as much as we do, even if you account for the deterrents. That's a hard pill to swallow, at least to a person like me who values free speech.
>Fun fact: China has a very low incarceration rate, about 15% that of the USA. It's not like people are getting thrown in jail right and left for opening their mouth.
That's not a good comparison. You would need to compare stats for number of people thrown in jail for speaking out against the government.
The US has the idiotic war on drugs and terrible recidivism driven by bad incentives to thank for its high incarceration rate.
The thing is though that the economic growth came after, and as a result of, the market deregulations and special economic zones instituted by the Deng administration. The founding principles of the CCP has been proven not to work in China, they led to millions of people starving to death and a huge brain drain to the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan the effects of which are still felt today.
So, I wonder if it's not all ignorance. I just don't see how anyone with access to uncensored history books can give credit to the CCP for the economic growth. Surely they could tell that Taiwan, also a Chinese country, has a far better track record when it comes to economic growth and the well being of their population (not to say that the Kuomintang has a squeaky clean record)?
They could also tell that there are a number of countries with fresh democracies that have fared a lot worse (See the entirety of eastern Europe for instance).
The view that "Meh, it could be worse" is the one that's been most prevalent among those who I've talked to about the issue. As mentioned higher up in the thread, it's easy to look the other way when it comes to a couple of human rights crimes when your family has gone from starvation to owning cars and apartments in skyscrapers in less than a generation.
Not to steer this completely off topic, but despite a lot of setbacks in Poland, Hungary and Russia the economic situation post USSR in Eastern Europe has been tremendous (Poland was the only country in the EU not to suffer negative growth in the Great Recession), the political rights to the citizens (such as being able to vote for more than one party), the freedom of the press increases (even in Poland, despite the recent setback with government intervention in public service media) is far beyond what China has mustered since the Deng deregulations started in the early 80s.
If you're Polish or even Russian you are far more likely to have a nice car, food on the table, a nice house, the ability to blog about whatever interests you, read what you want and even run for office than if you're a citizen of the PRC. So, again, it sounds like it's mostly ignorance, or expectations that democracies never experience setbacks.
People in general will tolerate restrictive systems as long as they are economically compensated or economic system is humming. The most authoritarian regimes, use fear but the most used tactic is to "payoff" the "village elders". If a dictator yielded the kind of break-neck growth that China experienced in any Western country, there is a good chance people will put up with it. The problem is when the growth dies, and the gravy train stops. How will CCP handle a low growth system? By becoming more authoritarian, that is what is happening in China with corruption purges.
While you may be right about the CCP's motives, China has its own long history of political thought, including the correct role of the State and public dissent. Guess what? For the vast majority of Chinese history, rulers viewed public dissent as tantamount to open rebellion and reacted accordingly.
Political systems are in part products of their culture. Free speech is not part of the cultural or political history of China, as it is in the West.
>Free speech is not part of the cultural or political history of China
And that has absolutely no impact on whether or not free speech is a fundamental human right. There's many examples of cultures with abhorrent traditions. It doesn't make them just and that's why many of those cultures reject those traditions today.
>And that has absolutely no impact on whether or not free speech is a fundamental human right.
Only you don't get to decide what's a "fundamental human right" for others (something that's based on one's own culture and, when intervened and enforced, is often interpreted by their own national interests -- like "bringing democracy").
Not to mention that what's "free speech" is not clear cut, most EU countries for example have totally different laws than the US, and you can land in jail or be hit with a hefty fine for stuff that's considered as protected by "free speech" in the US, and they consider it totally fine.
>There's many examples of cultures with abhorrent traditions. It doesn't make them just and that's why many of those cultures reject those traditions today.
Well, until China rejects their traditions, it's not for other countries to dictate it to them.
> Only you don't get to decide what's a "fundamental human right" for others
If you accept the concept of "fundamental human rights", then it seems to me that they are rights that are derived from the simple fact of being a human, regardless of what your culture or rulers currently impose on you, and which you accept axiomatically. That is what makes them "fundamental", rather than just the (larger) set of normal rights afforded to you by your state.
I could easily see things like having the right to not be held as a slave as belonging to such a fundamental set.
> Not to mention that what's "free speech" is not clear cut, most EU countries for example have totally different laws than the US
I think the issue is more about how much trespassing on the freedom of speech is allowed by different jurisdictions. Even in Europe very few argue that holocaust denial laws, or blasphemy laws are not a trespass on freedom of speech. It is just that many accept them. And many, including myself, do not, because it has had a chilling effect of public discourse on many important issues.
For the vast majority of Spanish history, rulers viewed public dissent as tantamount to open rebellion and reacted accordingly. Same with most European countries, if not all.
And how many hundreds of years and how much blood was spilled before the principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution took root in Europe? Would it have happened faster if instead external parties tried to push it on Europeans?
The current spell of freedom in Spain isn't the culmination of some positive trend that developed through the centuries.
50 years ago we had less freedom than the Chinese have today. Then the tyrant died of old age, and the absolute monarch that succeeded him decided democracy was the way to go.
Latin American countries have the same cultural roots as Spain. They were part of Spain for more centuries than they've been independent; and even after independence the cultural exchange has been continuous. Today, some are free, and some like Cuba or Venezuela are tyrannies.
That fatalism about some cultures not being ready for freedom is too simplistic when faced with the details of reality. The Chinese of Hong Kong and Taiwan handled freedom no problem; one from within, the other "pushed on them" by the British.
It seems very unlikely that Spain would have immediately adopted a stable, multiparty parliamentary democracy after Franco if it were not literally surrounded by a community of European nations that it interacted with intimately.
The right to self determination for every nation is the bedrock of the international system that Europeans created after centuries of bloody religious strife. Not sure how Hong Kong is a great example, unless you're proposing to go back to the days of colonialism and Westerners imposing their rules and values by force.
> Free speech is not part of the cultural or political history of China, as it is in the West.
This is not at all unique to Chinese culture - It is and has been the universal argument of dictators and oppressors worldwide. Putin uses it in Russia these days.
The claim is belied by Taiwan and Hong Kong, two indisputably Chinese places where free speech is highly valued. The idea that it's a Western value at all is belied by places like Japan, South Korea, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey (until recently) and endless more nations and cultures. Protestors in Iran and throughout the Mideast and into N. Africa in the Arab Spring risked (and many paid with) their lives for it. And very rarely does anyone with a choice vote to be rid of it.
It's widely considered a universal human value, and I think the evidence is overwhelming in support of that.
This is called culturalism. Saying X is not for race Y is racism. Saying that X is not for culture Y is culturalism. There is really not that much difference here. Because I am Chinese/Saudi/Russian etc. in no way implies that I, or my culture, does not value such a basic right as free speech
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Is it culturalism to say that Western cultures value free speech? If you just wanted to say that parent was wrong that Chinese don't value free speech, why the diatribe about culturalism and racism?
You also haven't really put forward any argument that the Chinese value free speech - you can make a base argument that it's valued in some Western countries because they've codified it in their laws - most notably the FA in the US(it's questionable how much this "basic right" is respected in reality). Calling it a "basic right" is culturalism by your own definition, as you apply your own cultural values(whatever they may be) over the whole of humanity. What makes you think humanity as a whole values this "basic right"? Millions of people live in countries where free speech is not as important as religion, for example, and blasphemy laws exist.
You seem to omit that's possible that we have universal pricinciples that's superior to whatever culture. You can attain these principles via philosophy. Any individuals can rediscover the values of free speech, freedom of government arbitrary, freedoms of thoughts and actions by just reflexion itself.
One cannot disassociate philosophical principles with the culture and history that brought about it.
By claiming there's some Universal Principal that's superior is basically saying that you're own beliefs and culture (presumably the one and the same as the proported Universal Principle) is superior.
This isn't mathematics where there's some objective truth.
>This is called culturalism. Saying X is not for race Y is racism. Saying that X is not for culture Y is culturalism.
You can give a name to anything, and call it a no-no, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are nuances, and there's also the matter of who gives the name, and under what premises.
>Because I am Chinese/Saudi/Russian etc. in no way implies that I, or my culture, does not value such a basic right as free speech
Actually it does. Many cultures value other things over and above free speech or individual freedom, like cooperation and social cohesion. Try selling the Japanese your "universal idea" of free speech in social situations for example...
It's funny how the "fundamental" rights projected to others as "universal" are often the rights and cultural preferences that are characterizing and championed by one's own culture.
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." (G. Bernard Shaw, Julius Caesar)
Free speech, privacy and access to a free press are part of the legal and constitutional/meta-legal framework for many democratic systems of government. In principle and in practice. There are laws in the US guaranteeing these freedoms, and hundreds of years of common law supporting and interpreting them.
Subverting those freedoms in the US, is subverting the US' system of government, and ilegal. There are (as they demonstrated) legal channels to defending their users' rights within the US' legal framework because they exist in the US' legal system.
There are philosphical elements to this, universal & inalienable rights and freedoms. But, these are philosophical. In the US, Apple acted at the legal level, with a legal argument not a philosophical one.
China is not a democracy. These rights are not a part of their system of government and there is no legal way to defend rights that are not recognized in that country. This is not some postmodernist or nihilist relativism. It's just recognizing that different laws and rights exist in different countries.
I'm not sure what you expect from Apple. They could pull out of China altogether, on the grounds that China's laws are too immoral. They could try to promote their idea of what a government should be and what rights citizens should have. This amounts to calling for a revolution.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation of a company. I don't think it will lead to a good place either. Apple are a computer company, not a revolutionary movement (1984 ad notwithstanding). The revolutionaries need to be (or not to be) Chinese citizens, not foreign companies.
The argument isn't that the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is, but rather that corporations must not be the ones deciding which laws are applicable where.
>corporations must not be the ones deciding which laws are applicable where.
This is literally restating this:
>the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is
Who decides when and where it is okay to disobey laws that restrict freedom/privacy? If not the modern day multi-nation states of corporations, who? Serfs?
You are missing the analogy in the previous sentence to that word, which does not demean people in the least. It should tell you what I think of the Chinese government.
>>> The CCP restricts free speech because it fears losing its ruling status.
They don't have any fear about that. The CCP is widely supported and deeply entrenched in Chinese society. This is just about preventing civil unrest/promoting a "harmonious society".
Apple is free to this move for business reasons, that is certainly true. But they can no longer also claim the moral high ground as a defender of personal liberty. Human rights do not stop at international borders. They cannot have it both ways.
Apple has been using privacy as a marketing tool. But apparently it will go no further than that. Privacy seems to be useful to Apple only if it can be used as a marketing tool, otherwise it's discarded as fast as some "offensive app" in the app store.
You're right. That's why neither iMessage nor FaceTime use encryption in china. Because they don't care.
Oh wait, Apple still uses into end encryption in China for both of those so that the Government Camp spy on people.
Getting rid of VPN apps is part of staying in China. So the question you have to ask is which is better for Apple to do: stay trying out without VPNs but keeping their consumer products encrypted whenever possible, or keep VPNs in the store and get all their products kicked out of the country.
If Apple gets kicked out, the no one gets to use VPNs on their iPhones. They don't get to use iPhones at all. They lose the encryption of iMessage in FaceTime.
(and the board may not let them pull out of China to anyway)
I don't think this logic holds. Apple and Amazon both spend millions every year on lobbying. I don't think their attempt at influencing policy has to do with championing a particular political ideology.
These companies don't follow required business practices out of a political sensitivity or an underlying respect for sovereignty, they do so because it is financially expedient and they demonstrate an eager willingness to modify those legislated business practices when presented a route to do so.
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.
> 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)
Or in other words, corporations should at all costs be faceless?
Is it wrong, then, that Tim Cook uses his CEO creds to rally for LBGT rights? Should companies stop meddling with politics by pushing back against encryption backdoors? Should companies use every harmful additive that's not yet illegal to please shareholders?
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?
> 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
No, I'm asking under Barrin92's own moral code: if there's nothing Apple could do that Barrin92 would find morally abhorrent and worth criticizing Apple for, assuming it was legal in the other country.
It's not like there are riots breaking out in the streets often
That's a funny position. So if the people actually hated it, but the State's repression mechanisms kept them in line, it would be moral?
I'm saying regardless of what my or someone elses moral positions are, businesses are not the right body to carry them out.
Apple is a business, not a governmental or civic institution. And to answer your question, of course Apple could do things that I consider morally abhorrent (even if they happen to be legal), but it is the public's and the respective governments job to set out the laws, it's not the job of Apple's CEO.
> unless the goal of your company is to champion a particular political ideology
The "Eichmann pathology" is even worse than most ideologies, since the content of the ideologies can change, but the conformism does not. By that logic, the problem with making deals with, say, the Nazis, was that it was illegal during war, nothing else, and if a company requires acceptance of that to exist, I require that company to not exist.
> for something that is not a universal law on the planet
Yes, and? Is there a universal law "on the planet" that you should only act according to some imaginary universal laws? Is there an universal law that a company should not "champion an ideology", or that companies just have to operate globally? Why can't people be restricted to acting in circles they are accountable in, why is that such a crazy idea?
"Ideologies" are not equally valid; morality is a real, very serious and important thing. Some ideologies promote oppression or even mass murder. And the value of liberty is not the same as the value of Christmas discounts.
Freedom to pursue your own ideology (as long as it doesn't hurt others) is widely considered a universal human right. Let's not pretend we can't see why, even if some want to disagree.
> A global company needs to be sensitive to these political/cultural differences and accommodate them.
Global companies are instrumental in transmitting western values to the rest of the world. You can't antagonize host countries but at the same time you can't ignore the arc of the moral universe.
Domestically, a great example is the economic repercussion for southern states that tried to pass trans bathroom laws. Companies didn't worry about "respecting political/cultural differences." They did what was right.
So by that logic, Chinese companies should push Chinese values on the rest of the world. Are you okay with that? And if not, what makes Western values special? Absent an independent moral authority (i.e. God of some sort), there's no way to say that Western values even should be spread. Absent an independent moral authority, pushing your values on everyone else is exactly what the Chinese government is doing.
The trans bathroom laws are a good example. What makes your position "right"? The other position happens to go against some of your core values (presumably), but that doesn't make it "wrong." Maybe your core values are "wrong" or at least incomplete.
There's a lot of people that are trying to push their values on people under the guise of "it's right." Ironically, these people will say they want people to have the freedom to live the way they want. Trans bathrooms, homosexual marriage: well, maybe I don't want to live in a world where I have to put up with that. Too bad, I don't get a choice, because "it's right."
You'd better have concrete direction from the independent moral authority (i.e. God) if you're going to push your values on other people, because otherwise it's just intolerant. "I feel strongly about this" != "it's right"
> what makes Western values special? Absent an independent moral authority (i.e. God of some sort), there's no way to say that Western values even should be spread.
That's a philosophical challenge but not a real argument. Obviously we can, we do, and we must make moral distinctions despite the handicap of our lack of omniscience.
One way we do it is by the use of reason, which separates humans from beasts and our current world from the Dark Ages. There are arguments against the universality of these values, but the one above isn't one of them.
If Chinese law required Apple to hand over names and locations of its users for mass executions, obviously the moral relativism argument wouldn't hold. The issue here is that VPNs are a less clear moral issue - obviously it would be better if Chinese people had free speech, but is it worth Apple fighting a battle for it? Another way to ask: Is it ok for Apple to sacrifice their rights in order to make more money?
I'll also point out that the values are not "Western", but universal. The people of Taiwan and Hong Kong strongly embrace these values. As do the people of India, Japan, South Korea, most South American countries, South Africa, all the protestors of the Arab Spring from Iran to North Africa, etc. The only people who say otherwise are the dictators and oppressors, who conveniently find that their cultures are not conducive to freedom (Putin is making the same argument these days - it's a universal value of dictators).
I think the moral obligation to make the world a better place trumps the need to be tolerant or accommodating.
My family is from Bangladesh. My cousin, who is a woman, moved to Australia. She's way happier in a society that allows freedom and equal participation to women. She, in particular, had chaffed at the social restrictions imposed on women in Bangladesh. I don't need to invoke God to realize which way is better.
Bangladesh is an interesting example because it was founded on western principles: a secular democracy with freedom of religion, women's suffrage, etc. Over the years those ideals have been chipped away. In my view, people who equivocate on westernization, or apologize for the forces that oppose westernization under the banner of tolerance, in Bangladesh are doing something profoundly immoral. They take responsibility for depriving people of happiness and prosperity.
> You'd better have concrete direction from the independent moral authority (i.e. God) if you're going to push your values on other people, because otherwise it's just intolerant. "I feel strongly about this" != "it's right"
Adding an objectively unverifiable external actor to whom you have ascribed the role a of moral arbiter and your belief that they feel strongly about a moral point to the equation doesn't really help anything compared to you feeling strongly about it yourself.
You'd better have concrete direction from the independent moral authority (i.e. God) if you're going to push your values on other people, because otherwise it's just intolerant.
There's a universal declaration of human rights. It's a pretty decent attempt at a starting point for non-divine moral authority.
Some values are better than other. It's not a popular statement when phrased that way, but every person in the world effectively asserts that every time they judge someone - you can't judge unless you apply some standards, and even when they're not own (e.g. "dura lex sed lex"), you're still exercising judgment in adopting them.
If you're still uncomfortable with this notion, ask yourself if you're okay with punishing (or deterring, or rehabilitating) murderers. If you answered "yes", then you believe that "murder is okay" is not a good value proposition, and "murder is wrong" is strictly better.
And no, you don't need a God for that. You can just say "I believe these values are better, as a matter of faith". You don't need to believe God or any other supernatural entities to have some moral axioms - case in point is The Satanic Temple, which has its tenets: https://thesatanictemple.com/about-us/tenets/ - but doesn't believe in supernatural.
> So pretending that the privacy issue is one of "morality"
You lost me there. Privacy is a human right. Would Apple be silent if China tortured gay people, too, because of "cultural differences" and just because it's trying to add an extra billion dollar to its balance sheet?
Now I can understand the argument that as a for-profit corporation Apple is "neutral" to the laws in various countries. But to take it much further say that privacy is not important - well, that's where I disagree completely. Some countries care about respecting human rights, others don't. That doesn't mean human rights are not important because some large economic powers don't respect them. Otherwise the US may have never abolished slavery either, if it was "all the same" and human rights didn't matter or were "relative" from the viewer's perspective.
Sure, I have no problem with that. But then it goes both way, the same companies should stop virtue signaling at home every times they disagree with a social policy enactment.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It also doesn't prevent people from using VPNs: the apps are just a convenient interface, Apple hasn't removed the ability to manually add your own.
More importantly, China is planning to block VPN at the protocol level starting in February. Apple can't do anything about that, and if all the other reasons against taking a stand here didn't make sense on their own, consider how silly it'd be to take a stand for a technology that's about to stop working anyway.
> China is planning to block VPN at the protocol level starting in February.
China has been banning various VPN protocols since forever, all working VPN software I'm aware of uses their own homegrown circumvention mechanism. However, these still work with the OS level VPN integration to reroute all traffic. (At least on Android, I assume it's similar for iOS.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The decision to prevent sideloading dates back to the release of the App Store. Upon release of the App Store, Apple charged a 30% royalty on every app sold. Developers were outraged by these fees, and fought against them. If Apple allowed side loading, then developers would sell their apps on their own websites and then tell users to sideload the apps. Apple had to prevent side loading to ensure success of their App Store. At the time, people with a developer account could always sideload apps, however they were much more difficult to obtain back then (had to send in verification).
Security was not the primary consideration. iOS was a rushed project and it took them many revisions to implement security features. In iOS 1.0, all apps ran as root. iOS didn't have ASLR until 4.3. This was fine since mobile malware barely existed back then.
I would argue Apple's sideloading motivations are primarily monetary based and for "protecting the user experience" (typical Apple PR talk). Why though, does android allow sideloading? I'd say it is because Android was ~2 years behind iOS and they needed to catch up. Therefore they made it very easy to build apps for their platform and let any developer install/test apps without an Android Market account. Also Android chose to be open source and there is little stopping someone from building their own version of Android without sideloading restrictions.
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.
Apple has most certainly taken a moral stance in the past as you point out. The galling part of the article to me was "The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China." It is not Apple's job to take a political stance. They can if they want, as evidenced by the examples you laid out, but there is no requirement. If the NYT wants to talk politics and precedence, perhaps they should direct their criticisms toward the U. S. government, et. al., who collectively think that China's membership in the WTO, and therefore I assume free trade with China, is just a-okay.
Apple is playing by the rules, and this time decided that this is not the hill they want to die on. That's their prerogative. Don't like the rules? Then go complain to those that make the rules to begin with, not those that play by those rules.
They still potentially can fix the problem. Wouldn't it be great if they used their influence to help fix things?
I agree that there's a "choose your battles" aspect to this. Considering what Apple did with the San Bernandino case, this seems (ideologically) right, but the potential losses are pretty high.
What I read from that is that you do not think that it is a more appropriate role for, say, the U. S. government. If that is the case, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. My POV is that to a large extent the U.s government has that leeway because they don't have financial incentives/disincentives to steer their decisions (this falls apart when viewed in a larger economic sense, but bear with me). Instead, the government makes laws, decrees, and treaties that fit within a worldview of what benefits the country as a whole, and to some extent to cajole other countries who might have a different worldview (Iran or Russia, for example). Or put another way, we leave it to the government to represent our moral, ethical and economic views of how the world should work. Whereas Apple should represent a different view: the desires of those that own stock with the symbol "AAPL", and their desire to make money (where are the "fiduciary obligation" folks when you need them?) If AAPL happens to take a stand I agree with, hurray, I'll buy more of their products and probably more of their stock. If they mistreat workers, I'll dig in and find out if I still feel comfortable giving them my monetary support (personally, no worse than others, maybe a little better). But what I don't expect from AAPL is for them to instigate "regime change" or whatever else it is the NYT is expecting them to do.
Anyway, that turned out longer than I wanted, but that's where I'm coming from.
Sure, if you are an US citizen, you can argue that it should be US government's job to represent your ideals in the wider world.
But your government is not the only party responsible for representing your moral or political positions in the world.
For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior.
Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, and certainly it represents many ideals of democracy and liberty more than other contending powers. But consider the mess that was Iran-Contra affair or the various regimes ranging from unsavory authoritarianism to sheer terrorism (with "disappearances" and torture) CIA supported in Latin America in the name of anti-communism. (God forbid someone propose an idea of land reform in South America or advancing workers' and natives' rights against UFC, despite that's how numerous European countries avoided communism.) Did these actions (and various other questionable shenanigans the US government has been partial to) represent your ethical positions?
It's everyone's job to do it, and what any government does is only part of that. For example, you mentioned AAPL stock owners. According to any sane ethical system, the moral duty of any individual CEO or a member of board or stock owner as a human person with rights and corresponding duties to act ethically overrides their financial or legal duty to maximize corporate profits.
The US Government is supposed to represent the people, and thus must uphold that people's values. The US government is a moral agent.
A person is a moral agent.
Though many here are happy to concede the reality that Apple is comprised of individuals and that it exists as an organisation as a part of society, and just view it as a profit-maximising entity. This is perverse. A corporation is a moral agent, and when it's morality conflicts with it's profits, morality should win. We'd expect nothing less of literally everybody/everything else.
I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.
A “moral agent” is not “an agent that acts according to correct moral principles” but “an agent with the appropriate facilties that morality or immorality can be attributed to it”.
Apple certainly does have agents that are not moral agents (e.g., automatons like Siri), but for a different reason than you suggest.
> the appropriate facilties that morality or immorality can be attributed to it
i m saying that the top brass making decisions are not acting as moral agents, because they don't feel the responsibility of any of the choices insofar as it increases the profit of the company.
Not feeling responsibility doesn't make you not a moral agent (whether you feel responsible is a separate issue from whether you have the capacity which makes it sensible for moral responsibility to be assigned to you), and adopting “advancing the profit of the company” as a value that overrides all other concerns (and that one is responsible for), in any case, is making a moral decision (that is, one about morality, whether or not any other observer or any objective morality that may or may not exist would paint it as a morally correct.)
Depending on your viewpoint, it's not even a problem. Telling China that their government is objectively wrong and should do things differently is pretty hypocritical unless we'd accept them telling us that our respective governments are wrong and should change.
> Telling China that their government is objectively wrong and should do things differently is pretty hypocritical unless we'd accept them telling us that our respective governments are wrong and should change.
Uh, did you miss the whole iPhone/FBI thing here. Not only did many of us in the US (and virtually all of us on HN) accept them telling us that our government was wrong and should change, we relished it! We were glad someone finally stood up to the US government and its surveillance overreach.
Could it be that many, perhaps most, Chinese would think the same way? I suspect so, given how many of them use VPNs there.
It would be hypocritical to say someone is wrong while, on the same point, say someone else is right (despite the actions being the same).
It's not hypocritical to say someone is wrong without mentioning all the other people are wrong. You can't list literally every bad thing that happens in every press release, and you can scope criticism.
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.
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.
> 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.
Huh. Sounds like a certain transportation company...
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.
Ya, Baidu got caught last year and got a slap on the wrist. Oddly enough, they were in it with a military hospital for that case, which should raise a lot of other eye brows.
China doesn't have rule of law, so everything is illegal but nothing is, if you can navigate that contradiction, then you just have to make sure your context isn't bad enough to be cracked down on. The same was true with Didi and anti-black cab laws (but Uber operates in the gray margins of those laws all the time, so there was no point in mentioning that).
China doesn't really care about your idealism. If you go against the government's interests, they will beat you down. This is one thing the Chinese companies get really well and allow them to play fast and lose with the law as long as they adhere to that one principal.
how about stop selling your single sided story? Baidu's involvement in those healthcare scams got its reputation totally trashed, which in turn failed numerous Baidu products. As a direct consequence, Baidu is now considered a tier-2 Internet company with almost weekly news reports talking about company XYZ is replacing Baidu.
it is also highly laughable for your private health insurance joke. there is _no_ Chinese law requiring any company to provide _private_ health insurance to anyone. Public healthcare levy is required by the law, that is all.
Jack Ma stealing tens of billions of dollars from Softbank and Yahoo by giving himself a very large stake in Ant Financial (completely unsupported by his ownership % in Alibaba), divesting it out of Alibaba without proper compensation.
Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval from AMZN shareholders.
You aren't making a fair comparison here. You will never be able to make a 1-1 comparisons between individuals in two countries. Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma are different people and live in different countries; their actions are based on their environment.
The heart of your argument is that a corporation is executing a transaction that could possible be illegal elsewhere: the US or Western Europe is better because this would not be possible here.
If that is your argument, I can think of two examples off the top of my head:
1. Goldman Sachs executive in 1MDB scandal
2. Banks offloading their mortgage-back securities positions by selling the directly opposite positions to their clients
Corporations executing shady transactions in the US or Western Europe is not as uncommon or "unthinkable" as you might imagine. Your argument stems from a enthocentric point of view and romanticizing one system over another by neglecting all the bad from one side.
You are not using the term "What aboutism" right. My argument isn't about Americans does it also, but rather providing counter argument to op's that it is "unthinkable" to think it would happen in the US or Western Europe.
I also fail to see how Chinese companies has anything related to my argument. Just because Chinese companies were involved doesn't weaken it.
You are seeing things through tinted shades before you even have the chance to analyze my argument. You are framing the argument as China vs US. I am pointing out the flaw in op's argument. See the difference ;). Your reply was rude.
Rumors said that Alibaba's IPO involved Boyu Capital. Jiang Zhicheng, the grandson of former President Jiang Zemin, was stake holder of the latter one. No wonder why Alibaba got through all the obstacles establishing its payment service under a murky supervision in early 2000s.
> Apple isn't a vessel for anyone's foreign policy objectives and it isn't a substitute for the state.
You're absolutely right, and you should follow this to its logical conclusion. Apple only does what's in its best interests. The company consistently acts to strengthen its brand whenever possible to make more money.
It's irrational to expect a corporation, whether it's Apple or any other entity, to act ethically. Every decision they make, from sponsoring LGBT events to pushing back against the FBI, is made carefully with their brand in mind. Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now.
The real question is this: What would you expect Apple to do as a shareholder?
>Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now.
They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a business.
The public at large wouldn't have cared just like they don't care when Apple complies with lawful orders for information as they do now [1].
Perhaps not. But Apple absolutely benefited from the overwhelmingly positive press coverage it received as a result of their decision to oppose the FBI. And when the FBI withdrew their request, Apple looked like the winner. So yes, I do believe they opposed the FBI in that instance to strengthen their brand.
Trump called for a boycott on Apple because of that, and that was when he was somewhat credible. It was a bad short term play financially, but I believe it was a good long term play. Apple plays the long game, one of the few public companies that still do. What they bought is that I believe Apple implements more security and privacy measures in their phone than any of the competition, and actively improve it as a priority.
Remember this document? Apple was the last company to be subverted either willingly nor not. I'll bet it pissed Cook the hell of that Apple was even on this list. I believe they completely revamped their cloud architecture after that.
Practically all my non-technical friends required several conversations to understand why Apple did what it did in the San Bernardino case. On one side you have a company refusing to unlock a mass shooter's phone. On the other side you have an abstract discussion about rights and technology. Guess which one appeals to the broader denominator.
> They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a business.
People are always saying things like this, but we never really have any good data on what the alternative would have been. Just because you're in the black doesn't mean you haven't lost billions of dollars in additional profits.
Apple had the first mover advantage with the iPhone. There is a fair argument that they would still have the bulk of the market if they had been more open, instead of conceding the majority share to Android.
I wonder what Apple's reaction would be if China (or another large non-western market) demanded to have root on people's iphones. If Apple said, it's our HW design, it can't be compromised, I'm sure some market with enough heft could come back and say, make one specific to our market or you don't sell here. At that point they'd likely capitulate.
I'd guess they'd downgrade security on clearly-identifiable devices. And that's okay. We lost the moral high ground on mass surveillance many years ago.
Yes, once a country obtains nuclear weapons, the options of influence are greatly reduced. You can no longer invade, you can no longer regime change, you might be able to install government antagonists, but that's about it. That's why all these non-nuclear countries want nuclear weapons.
Apple's leaders take strong stances in those American political positions because those stances are against the tribal outgroup of the people who control Apple.
The tribal outgroup is, of course, American conservatives - especially social conservatives and Christians.
Of course any reasonable person would acknowledge that China's government is far more guilty of all the same wrongs as American conservatives, and many more. However, China isn't the outgroup of the tribe that controls Apple. They are a "far group" - just some people on the other side of the world doing terrible things.
What's more, they're non-white, which in the far-left view means the real moral responsibility for their actions must be traced back to the decisions of a white man some time in the colonial past. Ultimately all wrongs point to the true tribal outgroup - white male Western conservatives.
So Apple's leaders don't really care emotionally about anything China's government is doing. Because the tribal lines don't point to caring.
]Fighting against American conservatives is really rewarding, in self-image and social standing, and it doesn't cost or risk much business-wise, and it feels good to make them suffer because activists don't like them anyway. Fighting against China isn't rewarding at all, and costs a lot more, and people are trained to see them as hypo-agentic victims since they're non-white in the first place. That's the difference.
This situation underlines and ideological stance that we all take for granted but that actually went questioned in the past:
That business and human rights are perpendicular issues. Actually it all started from the idea that free market causes a freer society. I think it is now clear that this causality is not true, but now proponents of unregulated free markets changed their stance to "Meh, that's the way we have done for decades, let's just keep that way."
My stance is that a global free-market is a good objective and should be encouraged, that borders should gradually disappear. However, encouraging goods and capital flow through otherwise tight borders is not helping reach that goal.
My theory is that 4 important things cross borders: goods, money, people and information. All 4 must have the same level of freedom. Imbalances should be addressed. For instance, China does not easily let people and information flow in and out of its territory, yet it lets funds flow and even subsidizes goods going out of it (Which is why Shenzhen to LA shipping can be cheaper than SF to LA). We should link these issues together. Either by funding and helping people and information cross these borders or, if impossible, by taxing goods and funds.
Actually a country that prevents people going out of it but let money go in and goods go out is the opposite of what the theory of democratic capitalism is about. It is a setup that allows outsourcing slavery. Free market in that case is not a perpendicular issue to this, but the very cause of the problem.
What I am proposing is a world where borders stop neither people, goods, information or funds. Most of the neoliberal horrors come from an imbalance of freedom between these 4 freedoms.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
They can refuse to comply on principle, get kicked out of China, and get sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.
What is it with tech people throwing potential fiduciary duty suits for management decisions around like they are a thing?
The suits themselves might be not-unknown, but it is very rare for one to succeed, especially if the company is profitable and the management hasn't broken US law.
Legally management has almost complete freedom to make management decisions - the "correct" course for shareholders to dispute that is either to buy more shares and try to get a board seat and fire management, or sell shares.
I'm not sure if Apple made the right decision here or not. But this "breach of fiduciary duty" argument is nonsense and it should be stopped.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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?
>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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".