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Comment by edandersen | Hacker News Reader

Are iMessage and Facetime disabled in China?

iMessage and FaceTime are available in China, but it hardly matters because most communication in China happens over WeChat. If all the important stuff is happening over the heavily monitored app, leaving a few scragglers is not a big deal. Especially because, it's not like a criminal gang is going to have the money to arm every member with an iPhone with China's wages (and the ones that do are likely white-collar and detectable elsewhere), and it's also not like Apple is allowed to actively advertise or even discuss themselves as being "more secure than WeChat."

EDIT: Also, ~80%-90% of iPhone users in the country likely have iCloud Backup on. iCloud Backup is not E2E-encrypted in China, and is hosted by a Chinese company instead of Apple. If you want full E2E, you need to use iMessage and hope everyone in the party doesn't have iCloud Backup on... and that's a pretty niche threat now.

iCloud backup is not E2E encrypted anywhere by default, although it does now have the option to turn it on in non-China countries.

It is technically E2EE, but the keys are stored by a Chinese company. So, yeah it's not encrypted from the Chinese government.

Kinda apropos, I’ve used international data roaming in mainland China and was (initially) astonished to find it totally bypassed the GFW and I could run IPsec and SSH unencumbered, none of the unabashed MITM fuckery I saw from using strong crypto over Chinese hotel wifi for more than a couple of seconds. That was a few years ago, I don’t know where their interception regime is at today, but it was a reminder that propaganda begins at home.

LTE and 5G standards allow end-to-end encryption of the roaming traffic. So, it's by design. If your operator chooses to enable e2e (and usually they do), there would be just two options: block your traffic entirely or let it pass as it is.

What's the end in this case?

The user and the operator.

No. iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption in China, probably among only a few apps allowed to do so.

Thats really weird, kinda like how Steam existed for so long in China.

Steam has e2e?

No, but it was a massive unregulated catalog of games. It would be like hosting American Netflix in China.

It has horrible slanderous counter-revolutionary and despicably immoral anti-chinese content.

Keys are managed by the government.

iCloud Keys are managed by a Chinese company, so in practice, yes. iPhone E2E stuff like iMessage, by definition, does not have keys that anyone else (including the government) possess.

Though it hardly matters when ~90% of iPhone users likely have iCloud Backup on. In which case their messages will be backed up to the cloud to where the government could get keys.

Source? IIRC Apple was hosting data from Chinese citizens in China to comply with regulation but still keeping encryption keys outside of China.

They gave it over. Apple does not care about privacy the way it has trained American consumer to think it does.

Well, to be fair, the alternative is to simply leave China entirely. Considering how much malware and spyware the average Chinese phone has... Better a compromised iPhone than some of those things.

This is… such a bad train of thought.

If you don’t know apple turned over private text messages of congressional officials and NYTimes reporters WITHOUT protest or question to the Trump Administration. And before you say otherwise Google and Microsoft both did not.

They do not care about privacy, it’s all marketing.

My understanding is that Messages and Facetime are still E2E encrypted in China. However, if you back things up in iCloud, China does have the keys to decrypt that. The difference is the UK wants to violate E2E encryption in Messages/FT.

I could be wrong about the current state, but I need to see evidence first.

No they are not. I talk to my family often on Facetime

Yeah, that's a bit of a double standard.

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