As an American I couldn’t care less that Chinese people’s data is handed over to Chinese people’s government, especially considering the alternative would be that Chinese people’s data is handed over to a US entity and by association the US government.
Contrary to popular belief, iCloud data, while encrypted, can be decrypted by Apple and is subject to US law enforcement requests. *
Considering this fact, it is pretty one-sighted to see this as some sort of unconceivable act. However if you look at it from the other side would we want all American user data (assuming Russia had a company that had such pervasive penetration into American lives as Apple does globally) to be sitting on Russian servers subject to arbitrary Russian laws?
So if you only consider American interests, it’s unconceivable for us to give up such power and control over other sovereign nations, but perhaps other countries don’t care about American interests like we do.
All Apple did in China was comply with local laws to stay in business there. What Apple is doing in the US is not mandated by law (as far as I know).
From the American side Apple has marketed itself as privacy focused, even fighting the FBI publicly at the risk of negative publicity. This about face is unexpected but also betrays those of us who invested in the Apple product line under the expectation they continue this standard of privacy and security that was marketed. Chinese people probably never expected this level of privacy to begin with, but we did and we can.
This to me is a surprising attitude. As an American whose outlook is generally framed by American values, it’s very upsetting to think of how privacy and freedoms are systematically impinged upon in so many parts of the world. If we can be upset about invasion of privacy in one country, why would those principles change at geopolitical borders?
The imposition of our own values onto others is how wars start. If you think that our values are encoded in laws, and accept that different sovereignties have different laws, then you should be able to accept that different people have different values and standards. Maybe to the EU we are barbarians because our consumer privacy laws are so lacking...
Those principles are not universal because different cultures have different values, beliefs, standards, and situations. If you've been taught otherwise then you've been brainwashed by a propaganda machine designed to motivate you to support and fight wars of value imposition like the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.
Plus, no country was around to teach the Americans how to build a society back then, and you could say we turned out fine enough.
We are big proponents of democracy but not only do we acknowledge that democracy is not a perfect system to begin with (something we are taught in schools), but our version of democracy isn't even a perfect execution of it, much like how China isn't really a communist utopia. We are more like a capitalist democracy, where effectively the wealthy can leverage more of a vote (through advertising, propaganda, PACs, etc). So if all our systems are flawed, who are we really to impose our flawed values. The answer is that the real motivation for imposing our values isn't some belief in fundamental ideals or values, but rather for American interests. We didn't setup a puppet bureaucrat in Afghanistan because of democracy, we just wanted a friendly government in the Middle East. The CIA operating in your country doesn't give you relief! No, they are not there to help YOU or your people.
Thank you for this thoughtful response! I think I see what you mean how values are not necessarily universal and that imposing them across cultures can go very very wrong. You’re totally right that we don’t have to look past the last several weeks’ world news for examples.
As a “value” democracy gets tricky. What does it mean exactly? Even within the US it takes on many contradictory forms. And why does democracy matter? Is it a worthy value simply because it’s the least bad political system? That’s not very universal as a reason, and surely not a good reason to make war.
Where I suppose I diverge is that I think freedom of expression (and, inextricably, guarantees of privacy) actually are universal values that cross whatever kind of boundary. What has nationality to do with it? Call me a myopic American but its hard for me to accept the idea that freedom of speech could be a culturally specific value.
Now should we enforce values with coercion? Generally I think you and I agree that we shouldn’t. But information technology (and, to a great extent, strong cryptography) provides an enormous (peaceful) opportunity to durably promote those values at an anthropocene scale.
Maybe nobody externally taught these values in the formation of the US, but it’s maybe also worth remarking that the formation greatly benefited from an unusually free press for that time period.
I agree with you that freedom of speech is a fairly important individual right. If you look at the reasoning behind its status it's probably because it's one of the early forms of power an individual could wield, much like how treasured gun rights are in America as well. It goes hand in hand with a free press.
That's certainly something the Chinese people deserve to have, but it's also not our fight, especially if the people of China are less interested in it than foreign spectators seem to be. Since their economy and standard of living is rising and more or less doing fairly well, it raises questions of motivations when we really want them to do something for them under the guise of for us. If we value our democracy or freedom of speech and press more than the average Chinese citizen does, then something is probably up... and something is in fact up, because wars are usually fought under the pretense of righteousness. But in reality almost all wars are fought in the interest of self-preservation and self-interest. US foreign policy is pretty much bound to be purely in the interest of its citizens much like how a corporation is bound to make a profit. If we actually promote free speech and democracy, it'll be due to self-interest, because for the simple reason that a politician can't really justify that they did something for the good of other non-constituents and hope to be re-elected.
Free speech is a great ideal, but it's also a tool used by the enemy for disinformation, destabilization, and defamation. This is similar to how encryption is great, but also empowers criminals just as it empowers resistance to tyranny. Some peoples will choose to have less free speech for more stability, and that is their choice. If the EU started fervently advocating for more consumer privacy protections in the US when we actual Americans don't care about it too much, we'd probably raise an eyebrow too on their actual motivations on matters of domestic concern.
Personally, from a righteousness point of view, if we really wanted to help people we'd take them into our borders and integrate them into productive members of our own society. Anything else is illegitimate. If we truly believe China is going the wrong way then we should take in their citizens who agree with us, and give them the opportunity to shine here. Humans are a resource, not a liability. If we can't take them in, then it's also not our place to tell them how to go about their lives. If we really want people to adopt our values, we should integrate them. And for the most part the US does a pretty good job of this as we're probably one of the most multi-cultural societies on this planet.
Governments ultimately draw their authority from their ability to keep their citizens from overthrowing them... China is doing a good enough job right now, even if you don't think so, and even if there are some bad things happening there. But the reality is that even if they were to submit to internationally audited and monitored elections overnight, it'd still be subject to the flaws of a democractic system (private interest group, big money influence, etc) that would taint the ideal of a fair election. A democractic election is ultimately still a proxy of power distribution. You'll end up with more of the same most likely, but with less excuses to point fingures at when they commit unpopular acts (for example they may still imprison Uighurs, expand in the Indian ocean, and threaten Taiwan).
Rather than making such strong remarks telling Chinese people what they are, you can just go there and ask them yourself instead of armchair posturing.
As a non-American, consider that many of us live in countries with better policies than yours, and we’d prefer not to have your ideas imposed on us by fiat, thanks.
So I’m quite happy that Apple has to follow local rules, and I respect Chinese citizens enough to believe that they can advocate for the change they want to see, over time.
Because the Chinese people value different things than the American people and they're governed by different norms and nobody nominated Americans to be privacy commander in chief.
I think gun laws in the US are terrible but I recognize the US has a different history and it's not my place to tell them how to live. Simple as that.
China actually has both actual elections (at the local level) and it definitely has negative public opinion. The Chinese are, if anything, some of the most ardent shitposters if you've actually ever used social media in China. Of course some of it is censored but most of it isn't, deliberately so because it's pretty much the only way to figure out what grievances people have, and technically because you can't stop a billion people with the ability to make memes and puns from getting around anything.[1] There's even people who make that stuff available for English speaking audiences[2]
This notion that you somehow can't figure out what the Chinese want, as if you couldn't talk to them, which you literally can, you could just visit China actually, just shows that the entire discourse happens at some sort of meme level.
That isn’t so just because you say it is and it seems like you have no idea what it is actually like to live in China. A lot of the people pushing back against anti-China sentiments are actually former Chinese citizens… and if you look at the anti-China lobby that consists of ex-Chinese you end up with the cult Falun Gong and ultra right-wing Epoch Times. That should already tell you a lot about how unrealistic your sentiments are and who is really pushing this narrative that Chinese people are somehow all slaves who do not know any better.
If you get a bunch of people who are completed disconnected from a constituency deciding what’s best for them you end up with the former British colony of America, the former democratic Afghanistan. As its clear you don’t know the actual sentiments of Chinese people it’s a bit ludicrous to suggest that you know what’s good for them better than they do.
Nobody fought the American war of independence on behalf of Americans. It’s arrogant to think that others need us to liberate them from some imagined subjugation.
> Chinese people probably never expected this level of privacy to begin with, but we did and we can.
Taiwanese users data is also backed up to China. This was confirmed to me by an Apple Support in China. Whether you believe Taiwan is part of China or not, I can assure you users in Taiwan do expect this level to privacy.
What we are seeing is a slow deterioration of user privacy across the Apple ecosystem, not just the US. So even if you don’t care about Chinese users data, it does show what Apple management as a whole thinks of your data.
> Contrary to popular belief, iCloud data, while encrypted, can be decrypted by Apple and is subject to US law enforcement requests.
The most seem to forget, that with this newcoming feature this is not possible anymore. Apple can’t decrypt your images anymore by request. (Read Apple’s PSI system)
There is also strong evidence that same is coming for backups. On iOS 15 beta, there is backup recovery option by authentication key.
They can’t decrypt the safety vouchers, which contain low resolution versions of your image until the conditions are met … which makes no sense as they have access to the cleartext full resolution image right there.
Unless of course this is a precursor to an E2E encrypted iCloud wherein Apple does not have the ability to decrypt your images server side. I don’t see how this design makes sense unless that’s the next step
> … which makes no sense as they have access to the cleartext full resolution image right there
They have no access. It is end-to-end encrypted with new system. That is the whole point of on-device scanning. It is not next step, it is already there.
That’s not my interpretation of the first party descriptions of the CSAM system. Clearly it works if photos are encrypted; nothing implies they’re using that capability yet.
If that were the case, this would not merely be a PR mess but PR malpractice of an entirely other, novel kind.
The system is complicated, especially the PSI paper. But it is clear, that it is designed to run on encrypted images, there is choice to run without it.
Apple didn’t wake up one day and decide to do this on a lark.
They’re being proactive, probably in a minimalist form, to anticipate regulatory powers on what is unarguably the largest or second largest platform used for illegal porn.
If FB screeners have ptsd and are killing themselves over what they have to see every day, imagine what is on iCloud and iPhones. Right now, nobody is required to filter that content while social media is. The alternative to “sure, you tell us what is illegal and we’ll scan for it” is “We’re the govt and we want to see everyones photos for the children.”
Sure, the latter may still happen, but probably later than sooner now. I’m surprised it has taken this long,
>Government by threatened legislation is much worse than government by actual legislation. Legislation is public, Legislation can be opposed, legislation can be reviewed by the court and so-forth. Allowing yourself (and your users) to controlled by threats of legislation is allowing democracy to be discarded.
Contrary to popular belief, iCloud data, while encrypted, can be decrypted by Apple and is subject to US law enforcement requests. *
Considering this fact, it is pretty one-sighted to see this as some sort of unconceivable act. However if you look at it from the other side would we want all American user data (assuming Russia had a company that had such pervasive penetration into American lives as Apple does globally) to be sitting on Russian servers subject to arbitrary Russian laws?
So if you only consider American interests, it’s unconceivable for us to give up such power and control over other sovereign nations, but perhaps other countries don’t care about American interests like we do.
All Apple did in China was comply with local laws to stay in business there. What Apple is doing in the US is not mandated by law (as far as I know).
From the American side Apple has marketed itself as privacy focused, even fighting the FBI publicly at the risk of negative publicity. This about face is unexpected but also betrays those of us who invested in the Apple product line under the expectation they continue this standard of privacy and security that was marketed. Chinese people probably never expected this level of privacy to begin with, but we did and we can.
* iCloud messages backups can be decrypted