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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

> What, are they working with someone? Five eyes? China? Spain? The Soviet Block?

Yes:

Apple canceled their plans to fully encrypt iCloud data after the FBI complained:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

In the Vault 7 leaks, Little Snitch was something specifically mentioned as being difficult to circumvent. Now, the ability to bypass it is baked into the OS:

https://blog.obdev.at/little-snitch-on-vault-7/

They moved iCloud keys to Chinese servers so the CCP could continue their surveillance:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

During the protests in Hong Kong, Apple took down apps that let people crowdsource tracking of police:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...

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> Apple said it decided it was better to offer iCloud under the new system because discontinuing it would lead to a bad user experience and actually lead to less data privacy and security for its Chinese customers.

Also very relevant that VPNs seem to be illegal in China.

And Apple forced the hand of Telegram to shut down the channels revealing the names of Belarus police.

> Also very relevant that VPNs seem to be illegal in China.

How illegal are they currently? When I lived there, they were illegal too, but still everybody would use them. There was always a difference between "illegal by law" and "really illegal".

The judiciary is not independent, so it's a moot point anyways. VPN use will just be used as another signal that you are possibly an enemy of the state.

I don't know, but the article literally states :

> while China does have data privacy laws, there are broad exceptions when authorities investigate criminal acts, which can include undermining communist values, “picking quarrels” online, or even using a virtual private network to browse the Internet privately.

Probably only as a means to get you in to charge you for other things, kind of like using "click it or ticket" used by cops to pull you over because you "look suspicious" and they're bored and want to do a full car search because "they smelled something".

Sadly, that's the flipside of our strategy of telling authoritarian governments that they should follow rule of law. China made laws that obligate data companies to share the data with the CCP. So Apple must comply. All according to the law.

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