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Does anyone believe in "change from the inside" any more?

From a "change from the inside" perspective, Apple can make more of a positive difference in pushing forward their agenda for countries like Russia, by staying in the Russian market, complying with a few government demands, and thus offering a sub-optimal form of their products/services—but still a form that has nonzero privacy/democracy/etc.-enhancing effects, relative to the alternatives that would fill the market in their absence.

For example, iOS devices at least have a universal base image where Apple knowingly makes these changes, and as few of them as possible; whereas Android devices get their firmware tampered with in each country by that country's OEMs, and so can be made arbitrarily compromised, including making those same changes to the maps on the client side.

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Or, to put a finer point on it: a company like Apple that offers privacy/security-enhancing products, opting out of a market because that market's government sees them as a threat and wants to neuter their abilities, would be like a peacekeeping organization opting out of a country because of the very things that make countries need peacekeeping (e.g. a failed state.)

Would you pressure KFOR to leave Kosovo because the Kosovo government doesn't let them do their jobs? No, that'd be reason for them to stay.

What's suddenly different if it's a profit-motivated corporation? They're still helping citizens evade state surveillance, even if entirely for selfish reasons.

> From a "change from the inside" perspective, Apple can make more of a positive difference in pushing forward their agenda for countries like Russia, by staying in the Russian market, complying with a few government demands

How did that work in China?

More to the point, companies are not nations or governments. Having agendas for countries is not their place.

> How did that work in China?

China is mostly what I was referring to, honestly. An iOS device that can run five secure-messaging apps instead of ten is still better than an Android device that's been potentially wiretapped during last-mile delivery to the customer.

(This is the same reason that contracts from Western governments propped up RIM for a while, before Apple became a viable replacement for them. A US government official could trust a Blackberry they acquired in China, far more than they could trust a regular Chinese cellphone.)

> More to the point, companies are not nations or governments. Having agendas for countries is not their place.

Companies (at least S-corps) don't have agendas per se; but their employees, as citizens of countries, certainly do. When everybody behind the design of an iPhone lives in the US, you'd better believe that the iPhone is being designed to put forward an implicit "agenda" carried by the cultural beliefs of citizens of the US, whether Apple-as-a-profit-motivated-corporation likes it or not. (You know how there's a recent trend in the US with corporations adopting social-justice messaging in their community guidelines? Think about how that kind of support develops in a corporation, and then replace "social justice" with "foreign policy.")

That's a bit fuzzy. If you want to carry that argument further, replace employees with shareholders. Re the messaging you refer to, it's good PR and it would occur without employee activism.

I think Apple doesn't really provide anything that I consider democracy enhancing. Few big tech companies do that.

I associate democracy with choice and Apple isn't really too active in that domain. As for the services their products provide, I think that is more in line with all alternatives.

That said, Apple at least seems to have protected user data from government access. Let's see if that holds.

But in practice government would have more difficulties to include backdoors in Android for example and Apple has a single point of failure.

> I associate democracy with choice and Apple isn't really too active in that domain.

I was using "democracy" here to refer specifically to political influence of a citizen (or citizenry in the aggregate) over a state. "Democracy-enhancing" thus means "enabling or easing participation in acts of democracy" or "protecting the individual from things that would prevent them from participating in acts of democracy" (where "acts of democracy" are things like votes, campaigns, debates, referendums, demonstrations, and any associated acts of evangelism/recruitment toward those activities — basically anything listed in the "Ways citizens can participate" list here: https://www.civiced.org/resources/curriculum/lesson-plans/45...)

Most communications technologies are democracy-enhancing, even when they are actively surveilled by a state actor, since there are always some democratic acts that the state either doesn't really care about, or doesn't know how to watch for. But, of course, non-surveillable communications technologies are more democracy-enhancing.

> But in practice government would have more difficulties to include backdoors in Android for example

Note that the Chinese intelligence apparatus need not actually put any backdoors into individual Android devices, nor put any backdoors into upstream Android as an OS. They just need to request that Chinese OEMs like Huawei backdoor their own Android distributions, and then let the state shoulder-surf the results; while also helping the OEMs out with funding for PR campaigns that encourage the use of domestic OEM brands over foreign OEM brands. The government doesn't even need any developers to do this; just money and strongly-worded letters!

I gotta say this is a pretty weak move on apples part. If apple really wants to be a cultural force, hard decisions must be made. Bowing to any government leader in any country is a slippery slope.

the problem is that even if i had a knee jerk reaction (i slightly did ;) ) and said 1)i should take a stance against apple 2) google is not an alternative -- what are my options? i can try to hack together some lineageOS device or something else, which will ruin the camera experience for me -- probably the most important feature of my smartphone for me.

on top of that, i'll still have to rely on google for map /traffic data as i'm not aware of any other well established alternatives -- but what's worse is that i'm still in the USA and while google shows me a free and liberated map of a world it obviously can be showing someone in russia/iran/china something completely different and 'local' to them.

how does one really fight this?

here maps. It's nokia. They're great. Not quite as good as google's offering, but better than apples.

How does it handle the Crimea question?

It was Nokia to be precise. Nokia sold it to AUDI, BMW and Daimler in 2015

Missed that some how. Thanks. Looks like other have come on board as well now.

Apple doesn't want to be a cultural force. Apple want to sell phones. They have to comply with local law to do so.

Doing otherwise is "bias" and "politics". Now, you may argue that Apple should be biased towards the Western view of the world, and have its own politics of national recognition, but there is substantial pushback against big tech companies having a political bias.

That’s true for all companies. Do you think that Facebook could take the “principled stand” of not putting their servers in countries with non democratically elected governments if any of those countries actually allowed FaceBook? Of course they can be principled about not putting their servers in China since FB isn’t allowed there anyway.

To be clear - this is a change in the way the maps are displayed when viewed from inside Russia only.

What you're indirectly saying is: Apple should break the law in countries that don't follow western ideals. This is a slipppery slope. Do you really want companies to fight over what they think is morally right?

...because then get ready for Xiaomi sending the floor plan from your Roomba straight to the chinese government.

...or what if Telegram suddenly started banning gay users because that's obviously wrong and immoral by Russian standards?

...or what if American Ad-Companies decided that they "morally disagree" with GDPR.

Just like any individual person, Companies can fight for their ideals as long as they follow the law of wherever they are.

But Apple is already doing that - they’re building their perception, at least in USA, as freedom of speech and privacy fighting company, with Tim leading the way sharing his personal experience being a gay man. Where is Tim’s aversion to oppression and discrimination when it comes to standing up to Russia and China? If Tim was an open gay Joe Schmo waking around in st Petersburg he would be considered a criminal. So yes - Apple does try to speak out of both ends and that’s my issue here: at least every other tech company acts as a corporation putting profit and market penetration first, only Apple tries very hard, in USA, to make it seem like they stand for something more only to immediately roll over behind the scenes.

I think you misunderstood. Yes, they're "fighting" for certain ideals - but only where it's legal to do so.

If the USA proposed a law that forced them to hand over all user data, they would of course try to fight it. But if it was passed, do you really think they would suddenly stop doing business in the USA because of their ideals?

> If Tim was an open gay Joe Schmo waking around in st Petersburg he would be considered a criminal.

It's not true. There are some laws against LGBT in Russia, but being gay is not prosecuted.

But there are sure some anti-gay laws in Saudi Arabia, which, AFAIK is not suppressed by any of US sanctions.

small sidenote -- telegram has nothing to do with russia, the founder had to flee russia to ensure his freedom, and that was _before_ he created telegram.