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Comment by tonylinn80 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I do live in China and I don't see anyone feeling any fear about this... Seriously, you can easily turn off keychain if you don't trust a cloud service to store all your passwords. And if i decide to use such a service, I'd certainly trust a local company much more than Apple or anything of US origin.

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Have you ever been to Xinjiang? A Uighur friend of mine is a tour guide there and he has to communicate with foreigners via email. He specifically uses foreign hosted mail and continually deletes his email and local cache and is paranoid about it.

You won't care about privacy until you've been on the receiving end of government interference in your life.

To be clear, keychain is end to end encrypted including the Cloud Key Vault that backs it up to potentially adversarial clouds. Not true for other iCloud data but your passwords are probably safe.

Yeah, other iCloud services are just widely unpopular in China, they're basically irrelevant.

Need to store photos? Baidu disk and tons of other services provide much larger space with no cost, and much more affordable paid version. Wallet? almost everyone in China uses Wechat pay or Alipay now. Even App Store supports Alipay for purchasing apps. Maybe they can steal my contacts? If so, they would have all my Wechat and QQ contacts already, maybe even all the messages. While I do like more privacy, but it's basically at the bottom of my list of concerns.

People mention "Chinese activists", well, almost all of them don't even live in China. Rest assured their lives are not impacted as well

There are many foreigners who live in China that are concerned about this. However, it is easy to get out of it just by setting your app store home to a country other than China.

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