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Comment by schappim | Hacker News Reader

My first (knee jerk) thought is “I guess this is what happens when you’re under pressure to perform better in China”; but I think there is more to the story than we know.

I would be surprised Apple if caved on this without having a mitigation strategy in place.

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The "more to the story" is that this is required by Chinese law, as explained by the article:

> In a statement, Apple said it had to comply with recently introduced Chinese laws that require cloud services offered to Chinese citizens be operated by Chinese companies and that the data be stored in China. It said that while the company’s values don’t change in different parts of the world, it is subject to each country’s laws.

Replace the word "China" with "Sweden" and it starts sounding like reasonable policy.

No it does not. Sweden probably is less likely to horribly abuse the data to incarcerate and execute citizens for disagreeing with the government, but the goal of the policy would be the same - to make all data about the person subject to the state's control. Swedish government might not be abusing this control right now, but nobody can guarantee it won't in 15 years.

> ...the goal of the policy would be the same - to make all data about the person subject to the state's control.

That's one-sided thinking. The goal may well be to make the data not subject to the (lack of) control of a foreign state, namely the United States in this case, but any foreign state in the general case.

In fact the EU already mandates similar restrictions for data of EU citizens and special provisions for EU-US data transfers:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/data...

> That's one-sided thinking.

Yes, one side I am interested in is my side. If I want to store my data in a different jurisdiction, because it is currently less interested in abusing my rights than the one my body physically resides in, I should have that option.

> In fact the EU already mandates similar restrictions for data of EU citizens

That's exactly my point. EU government might be currently less interested in explicit human rights violations than Chinese government, but their pattern of behavior is the same - "we own everything about our subjects, and won't let anybody - including subjects themselves - do anything to escape our control".

> the goal of the policy would be the same - to make all data about the person subject to the state's control.

The real goal is just as likely to be economic - a way to protect local businesses without actually calling it protectionism.

It's probably both. But experience shows control is much more important to the state than the well-being of any businesses.

Indeed, this article also could have been titled "Apple obeys the law of countries that it does business in", but it wouldn't have been as attention getting.

I am afraid any attempts to implement mitigations against Chinese law would result in outlawing these mitigations.

It is not like US at all.

This. Friends from China tell me that China is less "rule of law" than "rule of people".

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