Comment by cscurmudgeon
8 months ago
Same with tech and China. They fold like paper without any protest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.
Apple have repeatedly thrown their customers under the bus especially in China. At least Google had the courage to withdraw entirely.
Google never left China, they literally just moved to a new building on the other side of the road (in Zhongguancun, Beijing). They even “left a couple of boxes there”[1].
[1] Blum, Andrew, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York, Ecco, 2012. https://archive.org/details/unset0000unse_p9b6
You can't even install the play store in China... Google hasn't been accessible there since in 15 years.
You can buy an iPhone there today, and Apple has agreements with China to hand over user data and has done so in the past.
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Google in China is virtually a different company than the US - laptops and desktops issued by Google in the US will automatically erase their disks if they detect they're in one of a few countries (Iran, China, Russia, NK, etc.) and there is an entirely separate flow for workers there since GMail and the corporate intranet are inaccessible.
This is why I can never take their current alleged passion for privacy fully seriously. Sure, I do appreciate some of the features they're coming out with, but I don't trust them to not eventually drop this marketing angle and pull rugs when it's no longer profitable
Considering that it is run by a duplicitous Uncle Scrooge it is exactly what is going to happen. If the App Store golden goose get taken over (by DMA and similar legislation) they will lose a significant share of their revenue growth and it seems that this is simply unacceptable to current Apple leadership.
The iPhone is losing its luster and competitors are coming with extremely competitive devices at much cheaper prices, even at the most premium end there is not much of an edge, the product has been perfectly commoditized. Pursuing luxury will inexorably make it a smaller and smaller share of the market every year passing. The iPad and the Mac are pretty small share of the revenue too, by pursuing luxury Apple has put itself into the same corner, repeating previous mistake Steve Jobs warned against in an interview (while working at Next).
I don't see how they reconciliate their need for growth without fucking over their users at some point on the privacy bullshit. It's not as if they don't have a long history of doing that. There is one thing that is clear about Apple as a company: it loves money much more than its customers; in a way that makes regular companies look like boy scouts...
Google employees had the courage to force Google to pretend to withdraw.
But rarely do they have the courage to quit their jobs or go on strike, when Google does the next anti privacy thing.
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Apple leaving china does essentially nothing, the people there won’t get end to end encryption either way
Google had zero courage and went fully under Putin and helped him to silence Russian opposition (Navalny) during the crucial pre-election time.
Telegram did the same, btw.