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Comment by bmc7505 | Hacker News Reader

As much as I dislike Apple, they made the right choice here. While it may be easy to praise Apple's stance against FBI backdooring the iPhone's secure boot and condemn their compliance with removing VPN apps from the Chinese app store, the latter policy is completely unlike the former for several good reasons. With the Chinese market, you need to choose your battles.

Removing VPN apps from the Appstore does not compromise the privacy of any Apple users, and does not prevent existing users of these apps from continuing to use them on their devices. I would imagine Cook fought pretty hard to protect the privacy of Apple users to get this concession from the Chinese censors. For comparison, on Android, China is forcing users in Muslim regions to install apps that scan for "terrorist content" and track user activity.

https://thinkprogress.org/china-muslim-surveillance-policy-c...

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> 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.

You also don't know what the other options were. Banning VPN apps is a better response than only allowing compromised VPN clients.

> 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.)

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