Comment by aabhay
2 years ago
A lot of people seem to be focusing on how this program isn’t sufficient as a guarantee, but those people are missing the point.
The real value of this system is that Apple is making legally enforceable claims about their system. Shareholders can, and do, sue companies that make inaccurate claims about their infrastructure.
I’m 100% sure that Apple’s massive legal team would never let this kind of program exist if _they_ weren’t also confident in these claims. And a legal team at Apple certainly has both internal and external obligations to verify these claims.
America’s legal system is in my opinion what allows the US to dominate economically, creating virtuous cycles like this.
Unfortunately that doesn’t help anyone outside the US, not because of differences in the legal systems, but because as an American company Apple will always have to defer to the US agencies first.
I’m pretty sure a foreign shareholder can sue in a US court of law. While I agree that “shareholder” in this case means extra-massive moneyed entity, I firmly believe that even this provides a deterrence effect. At the very least, for the scale of operations in the US, there’s an extremely high trust environment. That level of trust doesn’t exist even for orders of magnitude smaller issues in most other countries
Yes, this is why we don't see bad behavior and willful abuse of the legal system by companies in the US.