Comment by toxik
4 years ago
> in a few years the offline Notes app will be phoning home if you write speech criticising the government in China.
A totalitarian autocracy like China does not need this technology to search for wrongspeech, sadly. You are of course aware that all Chinese iCloud users get their data stored in a special set of datacenters that Apple actually doesn't control.
The problem is, that this will be done in other, (currently) freer countries. Eg. Reddit has removed a lot of anti-china posts in the last few years. And of course, local leaders will use this to find anti-local-leader stuff on their citizens phones too.
This seems to be done voluntarily by NVIDIA, at least partially. While in Seattle I set up geo-blocking on my LAN as an experiment. Later when I tried to create an NVIDIA account I couldn't because it was attempting to store my PII at nvidia.cn. When I changed the url to nvidia.com everything worked just fine. I've always wondered what non-evil reasons one could use to explain that choice by NVIDIA. Ping was at least 2x longer to .cn.