Apple is enabling censorship of LGBTQ+ apps in 152 countries, new report finds | Hacker News Reader

Apple is enabling censorship of LGBTQ+ apps in 152 countries, new report finds

fightforthefuture.org

>Saudi Arabia is the App Store with most LGBTQ+ related apps unavailable (28 apps) followed by China (27).

Im curious to know who the criticism is being leveled at? Apple or Saudi Arabi. Because the latter isn't likely to even blink at LGBT rights and Apple cares far more about its bottom line than human rights. What's the desired change?

Well, "somehow", Android phones are sold in these countries, and while Android devices are not truly "open" by any respects, they almost always are able to let you "sideload" absolutely any sandboxed app you want... including these apps that are banned in all of these countries that Apple insists they are forced to block. The reality is that Apple is only forced to block them because they have decided to be a centralized arbiter of all content for these devices, something that Google and Samsung did not do, and so have created a powerful, centralized bottleneck that can be leveraged as a tool for regimes to control their population. The only reason this is thereby happening is because of Apple's greed: they would rather be able to collect 30% of every transaction that occurs on their systems than to add a trivial feature--sideloading--that would fight against and undermine this oppression.

I highly recommend watching a talk I was giving a few years back--the best version being when I did it at Mozilla Privacy Lab (link below)--which focuses on the ramifications of the core of this problem across the industry (but of course, with one of the narrative focuses being on Apple, as I have a lot of background knowledge there).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms

Sideloading apps that get you targeted by the local government isn't a win for those who end up arrested or killed.

>Egyptian authorities are using dating apps like Grindr to lure, arrest gay men

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/egyptian-authoriti...

Safari does not block a user from visiting dating websites, this is true even if a dating website is illegal for the user to access. Repressive police states do not limit themselves to only targeting people using dating applications versus dating websites.

If you pay them money, Apple has/will let you make virtually any data siphoning and user-hostile application you want, and they will allow you to sideload it without review (enterprise program). The common factor is control that benefits Apple.

There has been speculation that Google will eventually make its Advanced Protection model, currently optional, mandatory in a future Android version. A consequence of that will be that sideloading will only be possible if you connect to the phone over ADB and install the app from the command line that way. Obviously only a tiny, tiny amount of techies like us will every know how to do that. So, I don't think Google can so easily be held up as an example of user freedom.

It's not difficult to learn to do that, though, and regardless this is just speculation of what may happen.

Using the shell is difficult to learn for 99% of Android phone owners. We nerds here are not a representative crowd.

You don't particularly have to learn to "use the shell", however. If you only want to sideload apps it's just a matter of copying simple commands from the internet. This is well within the capabilities of most people who are technically competent enough to sideload apps now.

Users are certainly very reluctant to drop into a command line, but in my experience if it is a true necessity for something they want to do, they don't actually have that much difficulty with it.

No, the vast majority of Android phone owners are not going to open the command line. The very prospect of it will daunt them, or it may even be unfamiliar to them (a lot of Android users, especially in the developing world, rarely or never use a traditional computer and are unfamiliar with the full range of its features). Even those users who would copy and paste into the terminal are a niche more comparable to us here than the average phone owner.

Yes, of course sideloading may still remain possible in such a scenario, but it would not be mainstream enough to sustain any kind of mainstream ecosystem of apps outside of the Google Play Store. Even F-Droid supporters have been worried that clamping down on sideloading could marginalize F-Droid even further than it already is.

The vast majority of Android users are also not going to sideload illegal apps currently.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that trying to restrict users from installing software of their choice on their own computing device is user-hostile, but in this specific scenario, users sideloading apps banned by their government, I don't think having to open a command line to do it would significantly shrink that userbase, which is already comprised of a small minority of particularly committed people.

But all of this is moot regardless, because AFAIK this doesn't extend beyond the realm of speculation.

Doesn't that require a security key? That will never be implemented due to that requirement.

The political narrative they are trying to push is to "abolish the app store".

Well AFAIK, I dont think Apple or any exec ever publicly state their unconditional support of LGBTQ. So I think that is fine in my book. Unlike their "Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right." which they keep repeating.

And giving the evidence I am inclined to believe their repetition of privacy is more of an attack to Google and Facebook more than anything else. A similar tactics used against Qualcomm. Which basically align with your view, it is all about their bottom line.

Interestingly enough I guess this also describe the difference between Steve Job's Apple and Tim Cook's Apple. Steve was all about the Top Line [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5d0q1QseaQ

From their methodology section:

> If an app is available in at least one App Store but remains unavailable in one or more App Stores, the ASM will mark that app as unavailable in those App Stores.

This doesn’t seem to take into account whether the apps were removed by Apple or never enabled for those countries by the app’s publisher.

Right, are the researchers aware that devs can choose which countries their apps appear in? Seems like a really basic thing to miss.

The ‘least available’ app in their analysis is unavailable in most regions, including places like Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which I don’t think is due to any kind of censorship from those governments.

And yet, interestingly, developers removing their own apps is also Apple's fault in the end, for two reasons: one proximal, and the other ultimate. I work on an app that helps you bypass firewalls, and so it is illegal in China. I am pretty sure I would get in trouble with Apple if I allowed it to be downloaded in China, so I turn off the ability to download it in counties where I know I am not allowed to market it... if you thereby told me that every one of these apps was turned off by the developer, I would not be surprised.

However, more fundamentally: I also think we turn off the ability to download our app in some countries on Android... and yet I know that users can and do still install my app in those countries (hell: I want them to!!!) because Android almost always supports sideloading (and hell: the Google Play Store is often blocked in the most egregious counties anyway).

The real, underlying, ultimate issue is that, driven primarily by their greed, Apple has decided to create a centralized bottleneck on the deployment of applications to their platform, and so has--100% predictably: like this was ridiculously obvious when they started doing it what would happen, and they certainly are not so stupid to not now know in hindsight... they just don't care--become a tool of oppressive regimes to block and enforce the installation of software they dislike on people who happen to own an Apple device.

For a much wider and more general analysis of what is going on here, I highly recommend watching a talk I was giving a few years back called That's How You Get a Dystopia--the best version of which I did at Mozilla Privacy Lab (recording link below)--wherein I look at not only Apple, but the harms put upon users from centralization across the software industry, as well as discuss all the ways this also screws us even in counties that supposedly are quite liberal (as if nothing else, Apple is specifically extra-puritan, which causes a weird aftertaste of misogyny in their curation choices, such as causing Instagram to ban photos of people breastfeeding).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms

The real WTF is Apple setting up a list of countries in the first place. There should be no list of "block downloads in these countries" feature, because there should be no record of what country any given account "belongs to".

The Internet never cared about countries. Then Big Tech came with all this legacy horseshit of dividing and controlling individuals, grafted proprietary software onto the HTTP protocol to create what is effectively Cable TV 2.0, and marketed the hell out of it drowning out actual Internet culture.

It's the exact same attack other countercultural movements succumb to, but that doesn't mean we should just silently accept it.

> The Internet never cared about countries

However countries care about Apple and can affect its business, particularly if Apple doesn't obey local laws or regulations.

The vast majority of this is opt-in on Apple's (et al) part. They could have also chosen to offer their products "as is", and leave it up to foreign countries to firewall or not.

This is a little harder for Apple specifically, also selling hardware. But it would have been straightforward to spin the software store into a separate business, and they'd have been more robust for it.

But instead they fell back to all that legacy cruft, because it's what corporations know. And it's certainly lucrative to sell the fruits of freedom to authoritarian countries while filtering out the inconvenient parts. However the grassroots tech community should be denouncing them at every opportunity, rather than giving a pass to their corporate authoritarianism as if it in any way reflects Internet ideals.

what is the responsibility of a multinational corporation to enforce american cultural norms in other countries with different values?

It's odd to frame not forcing censorship on their users as "enforcing norms".

No, it isn't. Their norm is that certain things are not allowed to be spread, some others' norm is that it is.

What you're doing is no different than believing you're better and everyone else should be living by your standards, because reasons.

No, believing that something is "good" or "better" does not automatically translate into "good reasons". It's just you believing it's good/better.

Good reasons are the number one thing that gets people oppressed, because people in general are stupid enough to fall for them.

He's absolutely right. Worse, there's enough censorship coming from/happening because of the US, but apparently that doesn't bother anyone, because it's "for good reasons".

You don't even realize the hypocrisy, right?

Let me try to be clearer: Is Firefox "enforcing norms" when it allows access to websites a government (US included) has banned? Where does the force in enforceing come in?

"We're the good guys, therefore everyone who isn't like us is doing it wrong and must be pressured into complying with our norms and (lack of actual) values."

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