IOS15: China exempt from Apple 'private relay' privacy feature | Hacker News Reader

IOS15: China exempt from Apple 'private relay' privacy feature

bbc.com

41 pointsshivbhatt13 comments

This says it all really. Apple clearly won't risk losing profits while pushing a veneer of privacy. I have no trust in it at all.

The article says that... large company has to do what a national government tells them to?

Should this really be something we consider negatively? I believe quite strongly that privacy is a fundamental right. Apple obviously doesn't always act in everyone's best interests but they seem to be doing the most toward improving the overall computing experience by implementing privacy protections in their products.

Personally I am happy with the balance they strike between security, usability, and privacy. My primary threat model for keeping things private doesn't include my government, and if it did a large foreign company is one of the last places I would turn to. For what I do care about, at least for now Apple still has my trust (until they prove it's misplaced).

>Should this really be something we consider negatively?

Only because they said it is a fundamental human right.

What Apple don't understand is the way they have been doing PR and public messages and marketing in the past 4-5 years reeks of hypocrisy. It is similar to Developer Relations as Macro Arment pointed out [1]. It is very much Google in the early 00s.

Change the message to good old Steve Jobs fashion, helping their customers. And I am fine.

[1] https://marco.org/2021/06/03/developer-relations

Fundamental human rights should be guaranteed by governments, and not corporations.

If as a matter of policy, we want China to change its human rights stance, then we ought to use our government as the tool to enforce those changes.

Or may be not do business with China like Facebook, Twitter and to a certain extent Google.

Apple really cares about your privacy when advertisements are being served and wants the advertisers to serve iAds. But if a government wants to throw you in prison for what you said, Apple stops caring about your privacy.

>[...] the relay service will not be available in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines as well as China.

It also means it's only one blocked IP away from a downgrade attack. This way you just need to convince user's Iphone that it was China for it to stop attempting to do relaying.

This is likely controlled by the region setting on the device, which controls which iCloud cluster is in use (cf. China).

Interesting. So far Twitter mob says it's just Cloudflare's WARP which does not hide your IP, just the traffic from ISP.

It's two-hop with encryption/anonmyizing before sending your request.

It should be impossible for either hop to know exactly everything. Apple would know you but not where you're going and the 2nd hop will know the destination but not who you are.

Won't spammers using private relay lead to websites displaying captcha to all users coming from it, similar to how they do for VPN/Tor users currently?

Users they care about = Not in the Mainland

Good article on the subject from last month https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/18/report-apple-compromise...

> “After Chinese employees complained, it even dropped the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ slogan from the backs of iPhones,” the Times report says, noting the regime’s unwillingness to let Apple’s branding remain “American.”

>Cook has repeatedly tried to quiet criticism of Apple’s relationship with China by noting how efficient it makes the company. Not only does Apple’s partnership with the regime allow for access to, housing for, and factories for Chinese workers who “assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad, and Mac” to rake in at least “$55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China,” but it also gives the company an easy global reach

Reply on news.ycombinator.com