When Profits Threaten Privacy – 5 Things You Need to Know about Apple in China

Overall Amnesty has made a reasonable assessment of the issue. Apple is clearly in a difficult position and has to make compromises to keep doing business in China.

>> The best way to protect your personal information from being accessed by the Chinese government is to avoid storing it on servers inside China.

Fair enough, but as anyone who has spent a fair amount of time working and living in China knows, access to services hosted outside of the country can be difficult, if not impossible, without a VPN. Beijing's current plan, is to block access to any non-approved VPN services by the end of March 2018. Assuming that ban goes into effect, it will effectively cut users off from services not approved for the China market. Whether or not this will include Apple services hosted abroad remains to be seen.