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Comment by Majestic121 | Hacker News Reader

"Three people with knowledge of briefings between Apple and developers also said the Cupertino, California-based company would be wary of taking strong action, despite a clear violation of its stated rules, if CAID has the support of China’s tech giants as well as its government agencies."

That's chilling.

I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy protection, even though I'm not an Apple user, but if even them bow down like this, I'm not sure which company would have the backbone to stand up to the CCP.

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There's about 85.3 billion reasons a year for them to not stand up to the CCP and in the end Apple's interest in privacy is mostly a tool to differentiate its offerings from the competition so they can sell people stuff.

It's a $2.2 trillion dollar company with $200 billion in cash. They can easily afford to do the right thing. If they offered a private device and said to all governments "take it or leave it" then those governments would answer only to their people if they banned the device.

Of course, name one public corporation that would leave a little cash on the table, ever, to do the right thing.

I think China has some extra leverage to deploy here: China can respond "We leave it. Oh, one more thing: our domestic market is off limits to you. Pray we don't alter the deal further by kicking your manufacturing out too."

Kicking out Apple manufactoring won’t happen, because it’s actually dangerous to Chinese manufactoring. Apple is currently one of the only companies who could deal with being banned in China. It won’t be cheap or easy, but Apple could move manufactoring. They already have a deal with an Indian company who makes older iPhones for the indian market.

Apple is also one of the few companies who can either absorb the additional cost or even pass it on to customers.

But IF Apple was to move manufactoring it would set a dangerous precedence for other companies and potentially start a supply chain completely outside China.

You're assuming the shareholders would support such decision.

Keep in mind there's a legal mandate for public traded companies to increase share holders value. It's grey-ish legal requirement but I don't think the executive management wants to risk the legal consequences of doing the right thing.

Edit: it's shareholders and not stakeholders that matter.

If Apple was kicked out of China, leaving them with no Chinese manufacturing... ? In that case the shareholders have no option, it's either that or sell no new devices.

If you mean that the shareholders would rather please the Chinese government, rather than risk getting kicked out of China, then yes, I think Apple would go a long way to not piss off China.

You can make an argument that it increases shareholder value long term because if China increases human rights, it increases the shareholder value of the world in monetary terms because people will be better off.

> Keep in mind there's a legal mandate for public traded companies to increase share holders value. It's grey-ish legal requirement but I don't think the executive management wants to risk the legal consequences of doing the right thing.

What are the legal consequences? I keep reading about these mysterious laws that require management to maximize shareholder value or profits or whatnot, but I’ve never heard of a court punishing management for not doing so (never mind the fact that it’s impossible to define and prove per legal standards).

> Kicking out Apple manufactoring won’t happen [...] it would set a dangerous precedence

Ah, but if you don't care about setting a public example, you can punish them in more subtle ways.

The traditional trick in corrupt countries is to have a bunch rules that aren't enforced and everyone breaks all the time - then if the leaders decide they don't like you they just start enforcing the rules on you.

A corrupt regime would simply announce they were shocked - shocked! - to find parts of Apple's Chinese supply chain had low environmental standards.

Exactly. Whether a major corporation technically could do ”the right thing” at the expense of their own bottom line is a moot point, and it’d take a fundamental shift in our society for that to change. Rather, getting them to act in a way that’s beneficial to as many people as possible is a matter of economic incentives and regulation.

Google completely pulled out of China and practically all their products are banned & blocked in China as a result. Although considering most people don't even mention it and are happy to excuse companies like Apple, it's more of an example of how utterly meaningless it is for a company to do something like this. I'm sure Google, Apple, and their competitors will never repeat this mistake again.

> I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy protection.

From my understanding:

https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/gcbd...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

If you are in mainland china, a state owned telco owns the keys and the data stored in iCloud, so you really don't have any privacy with Apple if you are in China. It more or less ruins my opinion of Apple's stance of privacy.

I don't think Apple should care about CAA. It is a private organization, although it may have ways to lobby the government, it is far from CCP's business. Of course, it has all the big companies' support, it might be a problem for Apple.

Also I don't think Apple's policy would be a big problem for CAID. After all, you just need to ask your user's permission when loading your game, I am sure people will just click yes. If they don't, they are not your target user anyway.

I hope Apple hold a strong stance on this. Previous Tencent refused to pay Apple 30% of payment made to authors on WeChat, they resolved it by Apple backing down by not asking for the cut for those payments. It was a big story for a while. Apple's decision would be based on market.

there's literally no such thing as a private Chinese organization that is far from the CCP. It is a totalitarian government that regularly exerts control over even the most minute aspects of life. Believing that a large tech organization has no ties to the CCP is absurd.

>I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy protection

The Apple privacy push is for Apple protecting your data from 3d parties. Apple still collects plenty of information by itself.

From a consumer standpoint, there should be no difference if you care about privacy.

If you really want control over your data, you need a rooted Android phone running a custom rom with no Google apps, and use something like Firefox Focus for web interfaces to all the apps that you use.

This hasn’t played out yet. I’m curious who put this into multiple news streams this week. Apple doesn’t want to unilaterally block TikTok for using a state-backed solution. But if Washington requires it to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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