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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has appreciated the privacy stance Apple has had and the privacy assisting steps it has taken for a long time (long before iPhone), I believe Apple is coming out to be completely hypocritical and anti-privacy/anti-freedom on this app. I cannot believe that Tim Cook and other senior executives haven't examined this deeper and taken a bold stance to let the app stay! Shame on you, Apple!

Even John Gruber agrees: [1]

> I still haven’t seen which local laws it violates, other than the unwritten law of pissing off Beijing.

> This is a bad look for Apple, if you think capitulation is a bad look.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/10/apple-pulls-hkm...

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Apple only cares about privacy because it's a threat to Google and Facebook's business model. They don't care about privacy, they only care about "caring about privacy" when it is good for their business.

Right, and in marketing-speak it's called positioning. Taking a privacy stance allowed Apple to differentiate against their competitors without actually innovating.

Apple banned an app - 13 times that gives you a notification whenever there is publicly available news about a [drone strike](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-...).

The chances that they keep up an app that people use to gain unwanted transparency into any state is exactly 0%

At a more basic level, apple doesnt see people as customers. They have already maxed out thier target market. Expansion now turns on access to new markets: the will of governments. Governments are now the customer. Any app that angers them is for the block.

Well the same can be said about human rights, they only care about it when it affects their business model in a positive way. if it cost them money they are very willing to turn their backs on it.

privacy is not possible in a world where governments are free to suppress the speech and will of the people. any company claiming otherwise simply sees their bottom line as more important than people, whether they are employees or customers.

To me Apple is the worst here because Tim and team have no shame, they will strut upon their stage at their own conferences about how they stand for rights but when the show lights are off they act completely different.

Boycott Apple for sucking up to China. Google products are at least a year ahead now anyways and Google actually left China altogether at one point.

Yep, but they aren't saints: Project Dragonfly.

Which was only a project proposal that was cancelled after employees rebelled against it. Apple actually did it.

If I took a slightly less black and white stance, I would say that totally stand for privacy and human rights, in the United States.

Isn't is possible (yes) for people to care about principles in their homeland, where it matters to them more and impacts them more? I care a lot more about my hometown than BFE Chinese countryside, even though in principle I want them to have a living wage, decent time off, and good health care.

I am still angry at Apple, the NBA, Blizzard and the rest. I think this is a darker shade of grey, though.

Privacy is cheap to engineer because it involves not doing things or hiring more people. They won't allow actions, won't sync data, won't pursue advanced ML, etc etc. It's a clever way to say, "Keeping up with Chrome/Android is hard".

This is the worst take here. Whether Apple is sincere or not about privacy long term, they've created dedicated hardware IPs for doing ML on-phone to get around doing it in the cloud. This is not easier than just shipping all the data to AWS.

I can tell you from the inside that everything I've seen is genuine, even though it makes doing ML-based projects very difficult. That said, I'm very disappointed in this removal as to me it flies against the value.

This is true. But increasing revenue is the only way a corporation can "care" about anything within the current framework.

The framework needs to change. It's possible for the value of a company to be judged on more than just revenues.

I admit to being confused what this has to do with privacy.

While there are privacy concerns from the precedent it sets (can a journalist trust Apple not to bend to CPP information requests?), I agree that this seems to conflate privacy with an only indirectly-related subject.

Privacy is good. By being better for privacy than the worlds largest advertising company/consumer spy agency, Apple announced its intent to be for all that is good in the world. That it's a shining beacon of morality. Protector of Italian virginity.

China is bad. By capitulating to them after having declared themselves the enforcer of all that is good and holy, Apple has thus committed hypocrisy.

Apple has simply said it will pursue user privacy and security to the limits of what the law will allow. That is all.

What's the point when the world is legislating our privacy away? It's a pointless self-defeating marketing ploy then and nothing more.

Do you think it is ethical for a company to require it's employees to break the law?

It's not about breaking laws but about not having to break laws by not operating in regimes like China.

Do you not buy any goods made in China?

It's not possible to boycott China so no.

I try not to.

"If you can't be perfect, don't even try."

There's that and then there's being minimally consistent in one's efforts.

Kind of like someone who would make a fuss about not using plastic straws but systematically takes their car for <500 meters trips and washes their pants 5 times a week.

It's not a bad idea to remind people that if they make the effort of not using online services which compromise for China, they also should make the similar effort of reducing their physical Made in China goods consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Yes. Ethics is quite explicitly orthogonal to the law.

E.g. It was ethical but illegal for some to refuse participation in the holocaust.

Law encodes what those in power want you to do. Ethics encodes what society wants you to do. The two are rarely entirely aligned.

If the law is unethical yes.

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

And also force others to do so, via exploiting your power over them as an employer? Really?

In this case no one would have to do anything as the app was already live on the appstore.

And, in this case, the company will decide what laws are unethical?

> Do you think it is ethical for a company to require it's employees to break the law?

Unless Apple happened to be a Chinese company I'm having a trouble at finding the law that Apple is breaking. I'm sure the customers can decide if a shiny iPhone produced by an company subject to Chinese law is worth it and employees can decide if they want to be employed by a Chinese company.

It might be a bit much to require employees to break a law as it might expose individual employees to some legal consequences. But there are plenty of laws that are immoral. There are a number of good examples in the peer comments (some of the laws of Hitler's Germany for example). Any company manager or officer that insists on enforcing such laws is themself immoral. But it takes some skill to craft a company policy that could address the situation adequately.

I think you're being a bit cavalier with the distinction between complying with a law and enforcing it. If complying with a law is morally equivalent with enforcing it, you're tarring a lot of Jews in Nazi Germany with a very nasty smelling brush.

I really don't get this. Apple has done far more than any other company in the whole industry to fight for privacy rights. They have gone right up against the legal limits every time, while all the other vendors rolled over belly up at the slightest chance.

iMessage is one of the most secure messaging systems available anywhere and is very widely used in China. For most Chinese it's the only practical secure communications system they can buy. It puts industrial strength end to end encryption in the hands of millions of Chinese.

So I get you're angry about china, that's fine. I have family over there, so I know what it's like. But going after Apple, of all the companies doing business in China you could go after, just makes no sense to me whatever.

> It puts industrial strength end to end encryption in the hands of millions of Chinese.

But China doesn't allow stuff like that, surely there is a backdoor.

There is. https://www.wired.com/2015/09/apple-fighting-privacy-imessag...

I was trying draw the distinction between being forced to comply and enforcing, but I guess I did not get it right, or maybe I can't really get it right. I feel like enforcing is making someone else do something, while complying is doing it personally yourself, perhaps wilfully, perhaps not. So the managers are enforcing by coercing their employees to comply with immoral laws, and I think that is immoral.

Apple used to think so when privacy was on the line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack#Pho...

Actually, Tim Cook said:

"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

That to me is hypocritical as to what Apple is doing in China.

No, Apple unambiguously said on multiple occasions that they “believe privacy is a fundamental human right”[1].

[1]: https://www.apple.com/privacy/

Privacy and personal freedom go hand in hand.

Definitely agree. Privacy is protected by this app. By knowing the physical locations of the police, protesters can evade these anti-privacy forces.

Agreed! If Apple caves in to Chinese pressure on this, what else will they do? Does Xi Jinping's brutal authoritarian regime now effectively make decisions for Apple abroad, since they can always threaten to cut Apple out of the lucrative mainland market?

They are fine to piss off US government, because they know US government will play by the rules and let them do it. China won't, so as soon as China gives them a dirty look, they wet their pants and bend over.

Nothing in Twitter photo statement talks about privacy. It's clear why the app is problematic: It's being used to target law enforcement, putting those people into danger. The debate here should be between the tradeoff of said danger versus the dangers to the protesters, factoring in the standing-up-to-China.

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