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Comment by outsidetheparty | Hacker News Reader

So is literally every tech company working in China.

> The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/china...

I'm not at all arguing Apple is right to do this (in a moral sense. Certainly it's right in a purely financial sense); just that it's one small part of a much broader issue.

(EDIT: removed gratuitous complaint about clickbait headline; you guys have convinced me I was wrong. As long as I'm here, though, I really do recommend reading the Atlantic link above; it does a good job showing the context in which this is happening)

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Aren't most or all of those other companies Chinese? Apple still stands out there, especially given their "pro-privacy" slant.

True. (And you're right that it contradicts Apple's privacy stance outside of China, which justifies examining their stance here a little more closely; my swipe at the Apple-mention-as-clickbait may have been a bit of a knee-jerk. Apologies for that.)

But I would be shocked if the other major players (Facebook, Google, etc) aren't also participating in this; it seems to be the price of entry if they want to continue doing business there.

Google and Facebook are banned in China.

Well then. I stand corrected, thanks. Guess they chose not to pay the price of entry. Good for them

Google left after Chinese state sponsored hackers attacked their servers, IIRC.

Check out Operation Aurora.

That’s at least what Google said publicly was the reason they left China.

What about Microsoft? Is it participating?

http://fortune.com/2017/05/23/microsoft-claims-unique-cloud-...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/china/china-welcome

Microsoft uses a local partner to remain at arms length.

Is that like IBM in Edwin Black's book?

Amazon also had to sell to local partners.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-amazon-cloud/amazon...

Most people missed it, but Apple has already started started giving in to authorities, in China, the U.S., and probably elsewhere, too. I think that's newsworthy on its own given their "strong privacy stance".

https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/08/apple-fbi-unlock-texas-s...

And I believe their recent moves to weaken iOS security are related to this.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/oops-apple-has-seriously-weaken...

The China thing is related to this "move towards helping authorities", too. They're all connected. I don't know what or who convinced Tim Cook to give in and stop defending his customers' privacy against governments (at least compared to what was originally promised), but it's pretty clear that's what's happening here. I think we should expect more such moves from Apple in the future.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-i...

As for "but everyone's doing it" - come on, haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses? I thought Apple was a leader in the industry, paving the way for positive progress. Apple's mantra is "we challenge the status quo" and "we think different". Not "I guess we'll do whatever everyone else is doing."

If they keep this up, the answer to Simon Sinek's "WHY does Apple exist?" may soon become "We exist only to make money and nothing else", rather than inspire anyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVnN4S52F3k

Well they can’t in the EU because it would violate their privacy laws and be highly illegal.

Many large tech companies are having to retrofit their systems to deal with the privacy laws of the EU.

Germany also is in a league of its own in terms of its privacy laws.

Either way I don’t think much of it matters because I think the intelligence community probably has ways even around the privacy laws.

That first link does not even demonstrate what the article title claims. Apple offered assistance in the same way it always has, providing iCloud access logs, IP's, etc. They did not help the FBI unlock the phone.

The other errors they have had lately on the other hand do seem malicious, but I suspect either serious fuckups on engineer side, or people being paid/blackmailed by intelligence agencies to introduce backdoors.

More items have been leaving the secure envelope of the phone.

FaceTime is mediated by a central service, iMessage is moving to cloud services, iCloud backup is focused on, while iTunes sync is deemphasized.

> haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses?

Perhaps I worded that poorly. I had hoped that saying "I am not at all arguing that Apple is right to do this" made clear that I didn't intend that as an "excuse"; rather as "context".

BlackBerry had the same problem when nefarious characters ranging from street drug dealers to CEOs relied on PIN messaging that provided secure communication with no individual user accountability.

Nextel had the same issue when direct connect exploded and the police discovered it wasn’t tappable.

Every vendor folds.

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