That is some incredible spin.
My views on computing freedom generally skew towards the Stallman side of the spectrum, so I'd actually be fine with a stronger norm that Apple could tell govts to screw off[1]. But I'm very aware that I'm an outlier in this sense, and expecting Apple to push back in the face of a demand like this seems well beyond consistency with the norms that currently exist around tech companies' responsiveness expect to govt demands, on grounds of what the power relationship should be between governmental and corporate entities.
[1] (and ideally stop being so heavy-handed about their own enforcement of App Store apps...but that's another story)
The few situations where Hong Kong police have been in danger have come when a small group splits off and is isolated during a protest. In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
By its nature, the app shows large concentrations of police forces. The argument is ridiculous on its face, even if you don't know the situation on the ground in Hong Kong well.
No one has been able to point to a single Hong Kong law this app violates, or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
> In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
Right, this is what my questions were conditioned on. It's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on in situations like this when the government is so famously fond of misinformation and control of the press, but there's at least claims out there [1] that this has happened, along with plenty more examples of more general violence from sources that are not credibly controlled by China.
I don't pretend to know that this claim is true, but it's surprising to me that you are so confident that no such incidents have happened, even in the face of (even possibly false) news reports that it has happened.
More importantly, you're free to make whatever wild guesses that the official story is a lie in a way that Apple perhaps isn't: if the reports of ambushes are even somewhat credible, it's not clear to me how they could push back against a gov't claiming that an app is facilitating attacks on police.
Note that I'm not saying that their hands are definitely tied here, my model of this isn't high-confidence and I'd personally be opposed to the takedown of a communications app in most situations (including this one). I'm just trying to reconcile the reactions here to the norms we currently have around corporations' power relative to gov't.
> or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
This is fair; I am filling in the blanks with assumptions a little here: namely, that Apple's statement reflects the pretext of the govt's demand for removal. I also figure that isolated incidents of violence are far from difficult to come by in riots as intense as the ones in question (the Wikipedia page for the protests has a handful of examples). But it seems to me that this context in, say, the US, would be such that Apple would be criticized for refusal to remove the app, with plenty of takes about how irresponsible the decision is (it certainly stands on firmer ground than the new consensus that eg platforms are responsible for cracking down on "hate speech"). The difference here seems to be the legitimacy people grant to the gov't being resisted, and it's again not clear to me that that's a call that a company like Apple could or should be making (beyond broad decisions like whether or not to operate in the country).
Thanks for the thoughtful response by the way: my comment doesn't have a strong position but is exploring some nuance I have questions about, and I know HN isn't really the forum for posting anything but the kinds of neatly-wrapped takes that can be swallowed (or rejected) whole by simpletons. It's always nice to get some engagement with the content of the comment instead of the usual mindless pattern-matching + upvote/downvote that most here are limited to.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...
So then why ban the app?
You could make an argument that somehow they used some other technology to carry out their attack, but I'm not sure how much weight it'd have beyond the fact that no we don't have video (to my knowledge) of one of those guys explicitly opening and looking at the app to find the target. In any case, it certainly refutes the argument that no protesters have managed to catch the police by surprise or ambush them - because that is exactly what happened.
Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.
Or come and see for yourself.
Or rely on the eyewitness testimony of hundreds of journalists in Hong Kong who have seen this same situation play out—cops run out too far, get isolated, get scared, draw a sidearm.
Or figure it out from first principles on a message board.
Are you saying this video is taken out of context? Please do share any available video evidence. I assure you I tried quite hard to try to find more and this all I came up with! This is the thing that most confuses me about these protests. They are, by far, the most widely recorded protests in a developed nation - yet lengthy in context footage of the critical events events is surprisingly difficult to come by. Instead we just get snippets taken out of context that can be framed to show anything you want to show.
For instance this [1] is Reuters reporting of this video entitled "Dramatic footage captures moment when Hong Kong protester was shot." It strips out absolutely all context and splices the video together in a way that even makes it seem like it's an officer charging a protester who is simply trying to defend himself from an officer drawing a gun. It then includes clips from a police statement which, without the context of what that conflict was about, paired with the selected footage they provided sounds comically absurd.
This is absolutely propaganda, and quite ham handed propaganda at that. But of course there is also extensive propaganda coming from the Chinese side as well. It makes it all extremely difficult to have any clue of what is really happening. If you have any recommendations whatsoever on lengthy uninterrupted film footage on these events, I am absolutely all ears.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-anniversary-hongkon...
There's also lots and lots of long-form protest footage available, but you need a Chinese speaker to help you Google your way to it.
I don't speak Chinese or have links handy but it is not hard to find with some help from a native speaker. Dig around LiHKG.
Apple has shown incredible little spine in relation to china, probably because they are 100% dependent on them to make their phones.