Apple has a business to run. They abide by all sorts of requests in various countries in which they operate. Of course there has to be a line somewhere, I'm just not sure this is it.
It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
Apple should not be deceiving people outside China with CCP propaganda, which is what the maps are.
Until Apple has a redundant supply and manufacturing chain, it’s absurd to expect them to resist the CCP.
I hope they are building it.
... And a a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
As for being a shareholder kept in the dark, that’s absurd. I am a shareholder too, and almost no operational details about apple are available to us, which is totally normal.
Would you expect a big pop "WARNING: THIS CONTENT IS SHOWN DIFFERENTLY IN MAINLAND CHINA DUE TO REGULATIONS!"? Also, this will mostly yield a well-duh response. The only "appropriate" option in scale would be to put it somewhere in the fine print (IMO), but this is so close to not mentioning it at all that they might as well not.
Also, I don't think there's a general expectation for website to be the same everywhere. If you open google.com from Germany, would you be suprised to see Google in German? Project Gutenberg also was unavailable in Germany for quite some time; I don't think they informed every non-German reader about it.
> ... And a[s] a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
I'm pretty sure they don't inform shareholders over standard legal requests. They probably didn't ping you about FCC restricted radio frequencies either.
It's not that I generally agree with censoring, but I don't think Apple acted unreasonably here.
I must have misunderstood. Thanks for pointing that out.
We can find other examples, however. For example, Apple avoiding movies, etc. on Apple TV that challenge the CCP.
Lots of moral on the Internet, but then when it touches getting the next gadget, or saving some bucks...
If you want to control what maps Apple shows in China, then ask the government to do it. Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit. We barely have enough economic leverage to pressure them to be slightly better at enforcing IP. We aren't going to spare any for meaningless virtue signaling.
> It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
It took extreme sanctions and the most sophisticated cyberattack in history to get Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program (until Trump decided to reject the agreement). China has a much stronger economy and more allies.
Isn't that exactly what Apple did by moving factories to China?
> Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit.
Clearly Congress (and the Executive Branch, which is responsible for foreign policy) does plenty that is meaningful.
Companies do moral things all the time, being run by people and being, like people, tied to a community that they care about (often, to a degree) and which greatly affects the company. Without enlightened self-interest, and some broader self-interest, the society that provides customers, investors, employees, roads, security, markets, etc. - it collapses. The Middle Ages weren't good for business.
There are some additional rules for public companies, but in general, businesses can have whatever purpose "members of the company" (it's actually a legal term in many jurisdictions) agree on.
If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them themselves.
Of course, I do recognize that this is perhaps somewhat hypocritical: the OFAC list in the US comes to mind (which makes it illegal for US entities to do business with entities in certain "bad" countries). I'm reminded of GitHub's fight to allow people from Iran to use GitHub. I get the purpose of sanctions on Iran, but hurting regular Iranian citizens with these sorts of bans does nothing to punish or put pressure on the people who are actually the targets of sanctions.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
I'd also like to add that they are, for the most part, already building our products quite literally. Being on the bad side of China might've a farther reach than just missing out on a few customers.
Yeah it's hard, but if they aren't willing to do it, maybe we as a society should enact laws to force their hand? It's not like it's an impossible task.
The only worry is if that's also the point where their products will also be more advanced and thus more appealing regardless of the price.
I'll spin up a British Virgin Islands company or buy another passport first in response to any legislation aimed at preventing business with those whales
Others are already 5 steps ahead of me
Alternatively, US citizenship doesn't guarantee any beneficiary of national security or evacuation from another place when shit hits the fan.
So before I answer your question, what did you mean specifically?
It's better to figure out an exit (imo) than continue to capitulate on these kinds of things, particularly in a country that is hostile to foreign companies and IP (and particularly if one of your company values is the privacy of your users).
---
>>Peter Thiel: Well I think, again those aren’t the only two possibilities, I don’t think they created very much, I think a lot of it was just handed over from the west so it wasn’t even stolen.
You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question, “Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out through the front door, because if they didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway.
>>Peter Thiel: I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that.
https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...
Thiel hasn't even done that. His position seems to be that American companies should work with the US Military, but shouldn't work with the Chinese military. Such a position is certainly partisan, but it isn't hypocritical.
Try patriotic, or more cynically nationalistic.
1. An adherent to a party or faction. 2. A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
Maybe that word isn't judgemental enough for you, but it fits and I used it carefully.
It’s Google leadership capitulating to the (imo naive) politics of its workforce to not work with the USG, while continuing to support the governments of adversaries (because largely American politics ignores the plight of people in places like KSA and China under a weak kind of moral relativism).
If you genuinely believe that, then putting ever more powerful intelligence gathering tools in the hands of western governments, even at some risk of threats to freedoms in the west, might seem reasonable.
That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Otherwise more attacks will happen and the reflexive response will be an increase in authoritarianism at the expense of western ideals.
I don’t personally agree with his support of trump (I see it as a partisan blind spot because of his Cato institute Republican identity) to me trump increases authoritarian risk in the US. Otherwise I agree with a lot of Thiel’s positions, even where I disagree it’s rare that his position is not thoughtful.
As much as I dislike Thiel, he does have a point there: Russia is actively funding misinformation campaigns with the aim of splintering Europe (e.g. by funding far-right political parties like the AfD in Germany or the Brexiteers in the UK), and China is a threat on a geo-political level (New Belt Road) as well as a military threat (e.g. Taiwan), not to mention their Third Reich-inspired genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
The world is in a "war of cultures" indeed - the remnants of the Western democracies versus strong authoritarian governments. And we haven't found a way to counter Russian or Chinese political ambitions yet.
> That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Under normal circumstances, that confidence would be valid. Unfortunately, we have our own actors who have an interest in tearing down these "checks and balances" for their own gains (e.g. the Republicans systematically destroying trust in public institutions, from elections to the integrity of the FBI, or Poland and Hungary where the rulers want to stay in power and enrich themselves and their friends)... which means we as Western nations are in a "lose-lose" situation. We can't combat propaganda effectively for a variety of reasons, and as a result of that the propaganda tears down our societies.
I believe such a struggle exists as well. But I have my doubts whether one would find him fighting AGAINST the authoritarians.
He's just pro-Western civilization and pro-US.
"Apple" is not some abstract entity. There are people behind Apple (the shareholders, the managers, the employees). Real people, with real morals and values. I don't think that the only thing all of them care about is "running a business" and that all of them feel it absolves them from acting humanly. It's more complicated than that. (having said that, of course, greed is always strong).
I think that is precisely why this has been leaked. Some people inside Apple obviously are fed up with what Apple is doing. I would imagine especially those working in operation and supply chain.
There were lots of signs this was happening since 2016 if you are watching Apple supply chain over the years. But it is the first time we got some sort of evidence.
That fiduciary responsibility meme needs to die already. The flimsiest business justification is enough to cover company leadership's ass. Instead of "We refuse to do business with China because it's immoral" they need merely say "because we believe it's in the long term strategic interests of the company."
Again, stop it. The companies you want exist, they just go insolvent before you ever notice them. If you want to change the way the companies operate, you have to change the system, you can't just expect companies to "do the right thing" in an environment that penalizes them for that.
You can't have the free market cake and eat the ideological high ground at the same time.
Regardless, nothing you said refutes me. "Fiduciary responsibility" does not legally compel Apple to do business in China. If anything, such misconceptions about fiduciary duty are espoused by libertarians online, not rebuked by them.
And even if we go down that rabbit hole, we just become more like China with some kind of state mandated moral code that can be easily perverted...maybe we can't really win on this.
Lots of companies are able to exist without giving in to completely silly demands like "increase the size of these islands".
> If you want change
Actually, customers are able to cause lots of economic damages to companies, or their employees.
There is more that one way to Target Apple employees than what you suggested.
Target them personally, make them personally responsible for the actions that they did while thinking that they were some faceless entity in the machine, and make them toxic entities to hire or work with.
Sure, the company itself might be able to insulate itself from consequences, but not the individuals themselves. It would make people think twice about the actual negative effects of their actions, if they knew it would put them on blacklists.
Companies are run by people. It is not some faceless AI. Instead, decisions are made by individuals. And individuals are vulnerable.
When pressed about the financial prudence of prioritizing environmental outcomes Tim Cook snapped: "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was also not limited to accessibility, but applicable to many areas Apple desires to lead.
The conclusion is that Apple is explicitly not interested in prioritizing individual liberty.
Must they be pure or completely evil?
Companies have many focuses, including profit, of course, and also morality. Look at the behaviors of the world's leading companies. They need to survive and operate in society, not a Darwinian cleanroom, and they will lose a lot of customers, employees, investors, sympathetic elected officials, and more if they act like objectivists.
And then people rightly condemn them for it. Because not getting a pass even when the pressure is strong -- especially when the pressure is strong -- is the only incentive we can give them to even try to resist that pressure.
That sucks for them. It puts them between a rock and a hard place.
Too bad.
Because the alternative is that nobody fights against wrong.
Also, too bad because they are hardly orphan children caught on a battlefield. They are among the most power actors out there. I'd say, 'deal with it', but they don't complain.
The maps analogy is that it's one thing for the Chinese government to tell Apple to implement a mapping app from scratch so that it can be used to display bogus mapping data. It's quite another for the Chinese government to tell Apple to modify its existing Maps app data.
In light of the inherent amorality of companies that you are pointing out, the people working in these companies should be smart enough not to go out of their way to place themselves in situations with such moral hazards. Apple shouldn't be building weapons.
There is no novel technology in this. It’s very basic stuff doing a specific thing. It’s in no way a meaningful stepping stone to doing anything else.
If you’re against Apple scanning images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM that’s fine, say that, but it’s no stepping stone. If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
No, that's not how any of it works. Apple scans and matches your photos, on your device, against a list of hashes that represent government provided images that Apple has no knowledge of. The stipulation that images are only scanned when uploaded to Apple servers is a courtesy, not a technical limitation. The exact courtesy that would be rescinded by pressure from the Chinese government.
> If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
The law explicitly stipulates that Apple is _not_ required to scan photos for CSAM. The text of the law [1] explicitly protects people's privacy in the section titled "Protection of Privacy".
The scan is performed in the code that does the uploading, so it is a hard limitation of the implementation. They can't push a button to make it scan other photos, they would have to make significant code changes. Not hard code changes, none of this is hard or a major technology achievement, but the current implementation does one specific thing and that thing only.
On the legal requirement, huh, it looks like you're quite right. They are choosing to scan for CSMA loaded into their service. Good for them.
There's nothing to stop the Chinese government requiring Apple to make whatever code changes they require anyway.
The CSAM issue was mostly misunderstood by HN imo.
You just agree with the complaint that yes apple was scanning people's devices in certain circumstances.
The intention of the implementation is that if a user asks Apple to upload CSAM to iCloud, that Apple has the ability to check it and stop that CSAM landing on their servers. They don't want it there, and feel they have a right to check for it in advance so their servers are clear of CSAM and it stays on the user's phone. Frankly I think that's a reasonable attitude to take to CSAM.
Ok, and thats the problem. Because the scan is on the user's device. No, I don't think they should have the right to use someone else's device, that the individual owns, like that.
I just have a problem with Apple suggesting they are doing "good" with X, promising "good" with Y, with a big smile on its face in marketing, pumping up PR to the maximum. But every time you scrutinize the details they just dont hold up.
BTW people may want to look at Samsung's market share in China. Hint: it is a single digit number.
These megacorps have a big influence on the fabric of society.
They must be held to a higher standard.
They don't need and shouldn't make any difference at all. They could actually leave the Chinese market and make a difference for the rest of the world. They don't have and shouldn't have this responsibility anyway.
And they have the money, market share, and power to ignore China and not only survive it but continue to generate a lot of wealth for the shareholders.
Local investment requests however aren't novel - India have made similar requests which Apple have also fulfilled. China is only notable here because they have consistent human rights abuse issues, and with that there is a certain idealism that any kind of interaction with such a country is a form of consent.
While Apple's situation here isn't particularly noteworthy, it's a good proxy for a wider question about US companies reliance on China.
Also those with a keen eye would notice that China hasn't given Apple much here - they are still regularly admonished by the state-run press and Apple have only a handful of their most basic services available in the country.
Great point. Some movements are so anxious to minimize (or undermine) goverment that people get carried away, and forget all the things democracies can do and have done. We simply have to decide to do things as a people. China, for sure, is happy to see us divided.
https://china.usc.edu/statement-president-clinton-most-favor...