In part, it's because Google's business practices involve collecting all the information they can on users. I don't spend much time worrying about China (or other governments for that matter), but if I did, Google and Facebook would top my list of companies that I would be critical of.
Do we really believe that the way to circumvent all of China's internal internet control is for someone to just buy an iPhone? There are Uighurs in Xingjiang who own iPhones right now. Should they believe that iMessage in China is end-to-end secure and not worry that the government can obtain access? Based on the assurances of Tim Cook?
Whatever China wants includes concentration camps on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust (they're not death camps, just imprison over 1 million people based on ethnicity alone.) It includes a social score that is similar to America's no fly list, except extending to rail and not restricted to a few thousand people. Simply mentioning the anniversary date of tiananman square over any chat network (such as whatsapp, or wechat) would get your Internet cut off immediately. Free speech is such that you cannot publish a childish caricature (of their president as a teddy bear). And Google says here is every query by every user, by phone number. Go wild.
On the outrage-o-meter Google's dragonfly is like a surprise thermonuclear strike against an unsuspecting populated city during peacetime. Apple not showing news is like a guy grimacing at you, shaking his head in disgust, and turning on his heels and walking away.
So Apple allowing China what is essentially unrestricted access to iCloud data is not[0,1]? For honesty's sake, let's not cherry-pick.
That high-horse you're on only works when applied evenly and without prejudice.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/04/apple-...
[1] https://qz.com/1176376/apples-icloud-service-in-china-will-b...
But I agree that Apple seems to get a pass here and in the news coverage as well. Perhaps because Apple is more established or because Tim Cook has better connections with media and government? Or maybe they hire the best PR firms.
But rather than focusing on individual firms, I think we should be focusing on the monopolies these tech giants are creating and the dangerous it can be for society if they aren't "fair" actors. And if we want, we should expand it beyond tech to banking, agriculture, media, etc.
Just a few years ago we were worrying about "too-big-to-fail". And here we are with endless mergers and ever greater concentration of wealth and power and influence.
Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.
(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)
iOS disables Apple news based on the mobile country code / network code and not on the name in my experience.
If your iOS device doesn’t have cellular capability or if it is in airplane mode, it uses Ip addresses. This means you can enable airplane mode and connect to a vpn over Wi-Fi and circumvent the censorship.
The mechanism that does this appears to be the same mechanism that disables “global” Apple maps and switches to Apple maps provided by Chinese map maker Autonavi.
I wrote this post at the time the explains the censorship behavior which hasn’t changed.
https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china...
>This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.
I always believed in absolute freedom of expression. I cheered Google when they prioritized values over revenues and abandoned mainland China because of censorship requirements.
But maybe I need to update my beliefs based on new evidence.
When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online, maybe the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
Is it completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from China's policies of censorship and social control?
Society (and humanity) at large doesn't actually need the internet to do this. You already know about the LA riots in 1991 (and civil unrest before that); that wasn't organized over the Internet and yet was much more destructive than any riot in the US since then.
Cults (Jonestown, scientology), domestic terrorism (the Oklahoma City bombing, among others), and anti-woman violence (Polytechnique) all predate the rise of the mass-market Internet. Meanwhile, as opposed to the crime waves of the 80s and 90s the planet is a significantly safer place than it was then.
Contrast what China did 2 years earlier; they didn't need the Internet to murder hundreds of peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square. Or the concentration camps jailing people simply for existing (and chopping them up for organs), or the Great Leap Forward that managed to kill more people through starvation than there were casualties in WW2 (and other disastrous and unprotestable policies).
That's what policies of censorship and social control get you- people who can't speak up or forget how to cause catastrophe after catastrophe. People who actually have to think once in a while perform better, and people who are better at that tend to bring prosperity wherever they go, so they concentrate in countries where that ability is rewarded the most. Even though members of a more tolerant society mess up, they don't tend to turn into institutional mass murder (whereas that's exactly what happens in unfree societies like China's).
>the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
This has some truth to it; the 24-hour news cycle should be regulated because the direct result of its existence deludes members of society into thinking it's more dangerous than ever before when the exact opposite is true. But that's about all the truth it has.
Yes, it is completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from the Chinese Communist Party's policies of censorship and social control.
Luckily, we can read the articles written by people who investigate claims of vast online disinformation campaigns, and discover they are false. That's because there's not much censorship in the west. We can learn that the mainstream, 'official' narrative is false.
In China you'd never read about any claims that contradict the official narrative. You'd maybe suspect there was something wrong with it, but have no good way to prove it.
BTW I don't know what "stochastic terror" is. But you sound pretty scared. Maybe you've fallen victim to it ;)
It's China that is censoring the news here. But for some reason we're mainly blaming Apple for it? It's makes no sense.
And what the heck does the API Apple uses to determine location have to do with it? If Apple had the choice, they would use no API to censor the news.
Anyway, for the people who really are worried about censorship (I am) it's worth understanding and acknowledging what's actually going on here. This problem is not an Apple problem and if you try to treat it like one, that's actually worse than doing nothing at all since it draws attention away from the actual problem.
(There are Apple problems, of course, but this isn't one of them.) This is a big China problem.
Apple is going above and beyond China’s legal requirements in censorship, censoring news voluntarily in their News app on US phones with US SIM cards when used in China-phones that can access normal news websites without censorship just fine outside of the News app.
This is a behavior specific to Apple’s new product, which has not launched for Chinese users at all yet.
China doesn’t want certain information within its borders. If you could “smuggle” it via outside phone + outside SIM, it makes all protections worthless.
Same with Netflix: even though I pay with credit card from Europe, when physically (IP-wise) in US I can see the US catalog.
> ...censoring news voluntarily...
That just doesn't make sense. If Apple wanted to censor their News app, there's no reason they would restrict themselves to China. They could "block" it everywhere, if that's what they wanted to do -- by simply not having a News app at all.
To say it another way, there are multiple parties doing multiple wrongs here.
It's not a good thing for Apple to be innovating on ways to enforce Chinese censorship (although if I understand correctly, it doesn't matter—China could already censor roaming cell traffic, they just choose not to).
Really? Travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM are excepted from Chinese censorship laws? I find this very difficult to believe. It's more likely that censorship laws are simply more difficult to enforce on travelers, which doesn't make it any more legal.
Not that I agree with Chinese practices.
So should Apple News allow Nazi stories in Germany? Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in a Thailand? Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person in the US? Should Apple pay taxes? Should Apple prohibit child porn?
All of these are examples of “kowtowing” to governments. What’s the difference between kowtowing and following the law? How can someone expect Apple to pay a “fair share” of EU taxes but then expect them to not follow Chinese law? If a company boycotts countries based on ideology, pretty soon every country gets boycotted over something or another. There are exactly zero perfect countries.
Regardless of the merit of the argument of Apple censoring News in China, this is a stupid argument. For Apple, there is no private API: they wrote the thing themselves; for privacy they prevent third-party applications from accessing it. What would you like them to do, remove the API entirely or open it to third-party developers?
Instead, the author does some overly verbose and hot take dance to propagate clickbait, which is then shockingly submitted to HN. Call this garbage for what it is.
FTFY
I used to use News App with U.S. sim card, but the restriction got tighter and tighter.
