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Comment by three_seagrass | Hacker News Reader

>Let's assume they do eventually flip their brand on its head and turn on the users.

Chinese customers don't need to wait. Apple flipped sometime in 2017 and gave up all user emails, photos, messages, etc. to the CCP to stay in the market.

People complain about TikTok spying for China, but Apple is one of the biggest CCP spies around. That runs counter to the brand headspace they keep investing in though.

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Seriously, with what we know about PRISM [1], why do comments on here only fear China's surveillance and not that of the United States?

Apple was revealed to be a participant in 2013; there is no reason to believe they are not a part of it now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

I'll never understand people who expect Apple to try and fight the CCP and inevitably get themselves barred from the Chinese market. It's not principled, it's just dumb and will completely screw over all of their current customers in the country who will now have useless devices. Apple is not a nation-state and has no judiciary or military power, and if they're to have any hope of making positive change in the country they need to play ball to some extent and become a large player who can actually exert some influence.

>I'll never understand people who expect Apple to try and fight the CCP and inevitably get themselves barred from the Chinese market.

People have this expectation because other companies have done this.

For example, Google employees revolted when dragonfly was leaked, and got the CCP search-spying project killed. It's weird to think that Google cared more about user privacy than profits than Apple does, but that's how weird the branding works here.

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