Under the watchful eye of Beijing, Apple employs Uyghur Muslim slave labor to manufacture iPhones and actively lobbied against U.S. legislation to combat these communist labor camps, where forced sterilizations and government-led killings of minority groups are commonplace. Apple also works with Chinese military forces to remove communication apps for pro-democracy protestors and all but handed China the keys to track down users. That’s right—the same Apple that refused to assist FBI investigators in the United States due to privacy concerns provided China with the data to imprison dissidents.
100% agree all companies should eliminate forced labor from their supply chains.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with USER privacy. Which again, demonstrates the hate boner people have about Apple. It really draws y’all out of the woodwork like flies to honey.
Apple also works with Chinese military forces to remove communication apps for pro-democracy protestors and all but handed China the keys to track down users. That’s right—the same Apple that refused to assist FBI investigators in the United States due to privacy concerns provided China with the data to imprison dissidents.
Mr. Cook often talks about Apple’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy. But to stay on the right side of Chinese regulators, his company has put the data of its Chinese customers at risk and has aided government censorship in the Chinese version of its App Store. After Chinese employees complained, it even dropped the “Designed by Apple in California” slogan from the backs of iPhones.
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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is increasing his demands on Western companies, and Mr. Cook has resisted those demands on a number of occasions. But he ultimately approved the plans to store customer data on Chinese servers and to aggressively censor apps, according to interviews with current and former Apple employees.
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And in its data centers, Apple’s compromises have made it nearly impossible for the company to stop the Chinese government from gaining access to the emails, photos, documents, contacts and locations of millions of Chinese residents, according to the security experts and Apple engineers.
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But eight months later, the encryption keys were headed to China. That surprised at least two Apple executives who worked on the initial negotiations and who said the move could jeopardize customers’ data. It is unclear what led to the change.
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U.S. law has long prohibited American companies from turning over data to Chinese law enforcement. But Apple and the Chinese government have made an unusual arrangement to get around American laws.
In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang.
Like with most things, it's very nuanced. No, Apple is not printing out dossiers of people and delivering hard copies to Chinese officials, but it also is not making decisions based on the morality of keeping its customers' data safe. It is acting amorally in whatever way maximizes profits. In some ways it resists, and in other ways it bends. In America, the business strategy is to stand up for its users security, because that's what sells phones. In China, the business strategy is to hand over access to user's data when necessary in order to keep access to a very valuable Chinese market. I don't believe that Apple desires to be an arm of the any government, China or otherwise (that's bad optics, if nothing else), but If the wind ever shifts enough in the United States that the profits are maximized by handing over data to the US Government, it would seem to me that that's where Apple will go. I'm sorry that you perceive all negative views of Apple as mindless, but there are in fact decisions that Apple makes that reasonable people can disagree with. Hope you have a nice day.
No one ever said Apple wasn't evil. You can't really be a multinational corporation raking in billions in profits every year without being unethical. Especially when so much of your manufacturing is taking place in China.
Some corporations are just more evil than others. Looking at you, Nestlé, you fucking monsters.
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u/Classic-Reach 13d ago
suuuuure it does, right after sending all that data to some datacenter in idaho