Tim Cook, in an op-ed in Time Magazine:
In 2019, it’s time to stand up for the right to privacy—yours, mine, all of ours. Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irresponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives.
This problem is solvable—it isn’t too big, too challenging or too late. Innovation, breakthrough ideas and great features can go hand in hand with user privacy—and they must. Realizing technology’s potential depends on it.
That’s why I and others are calling on the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation—a landmark package of reforms that protect and empower the consumer. Last year, before a global body of privacy regulators, I laid out four principles that I believe should guide legislation.
If Tim Cook and Apple really cared about privacy, they wouldn’t have thrown 1.2 billion Chinese under the bus by handing over iCloud data to the Chinese government, and by sheepishly refusing to even mention “China” when it comes to Apple’s thin veneer of “privacy first”.
Apple’s complete cooperation with the Chinese government makes it very clear that Apple is all too eager to roll over and disregard its privacy chest-thumping the second their own bottom line is at risk. And lest we forget – China is a totalitarian, repressive regime that doesn’t shy away from torture and concentration camps.
How many Chinese Apple users have ended up in prison – or worse – because Tim Cook only cares about your privacy if you’re western?
Tim Cook is a hack, simple as that, if he speaks, you know its a lie.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-apple-sold-china.html
Empirically speaking, not most of them.
Idealistically speaking it should be none of them.
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Turns out the end-quote tag is not recognized if following right after the URL. Needed to separate it by a space.
The fact that he’s pushing for stronger privacy is great, but the thing is that in USA, privacy is only a thing for corporations and the rich.
Congress saw no big deal from ISPs selling information about the sites their users visit, and mobile ones location data about its users.
The real problem is that governments need to be democratic and pro-privacy before that can be truth, and China (like Thom said) and USA really don’t give a fuck. The EU does, but they still don’t enforce details and there’s really no body in government that can do regular audits or does regular audits and goes all the way. That being said, I’ll take the EU privacy over USA any day.
Poseidon,
You’re right. A lot of it stems from corruption in the executive branches too. The FCC repealing net neutrality was quite treasonous against the people’s interests. Ajit pai is totally corrupt and that’s plain for everyone to see.
I posted this before but I don’t think many people saw it, my ISP is hijacking HTTP connections to inject it’s own ads on domains that they don’t own. I find this despicable, and yet with such a corrupt FCC and no competition to speak of, there’s very little recourse for consumers.
https://i.postimg.cc/SsTbTrQD/osnews-hijack.png
I think its great that a company takes a stand.
Even if its just for a limited set of users they have to start somewhere. And starting in China seems like playing Dark Souls standing on your head.
You start where you have an actual possibility to affect (ie large US company start in the US) and then go from there.
Google had their “Dont be evil” but they removed it.
Thom, this is very simple. You obey the laws of the countries in which you do business, or you do not do business there. Period. At least in the U.S, he’s allowed to make such statements and call on congress to act. Will they? I sincerely doubt it. But if you really think Apple should have broken Chinese law just because they disagreed with it, what you really mean is that they should not have done business in China. You don’t get to choose which laws you obey and which laws you do not without consequence and, until China changes, doing business there requires that you play by their rules or suffer the consequences.
That’s true, but pretending to put privacy first is no longer a valid position at that point. There’s always the option of withdrawing from a market in protest, but I guess money is more important than ethics nowadays.
“nowadays”? When was it any different? (and it could easily be argued it was much worse than now at many points in history)
Do you deliberately misunderstand people to make a statement? They’re obviously saying Apple should not be doing business in China.
darknexus,
This seems to miss Thom’s point though: If they can’t do business in a country without throwing away their values (privacy/human rights), then they shouldn’t do business in that country. If they choose to throw away their values to do business in a country, then that may be legal but they obviously value money over privacy & human rights. Tim Cook cannot contest that, he might say they did the best they could, but the undeniable fact is that they do not believe in values enough to turn down the money. Now it’s hard to turn down money, especially people who are struggling end up turning to things they’re ashamed of to feed their families. But apple doesn’t have this excuse, they are one of the world’s wealthiest companies with more money than they even know what to do with. So they’re not only choosing money over values, they’re choosing extravagance over values. Some will say that’s what businesses do and we should have no expectation otherwise, but it renders Tim Cook’s words hypocritical. While I’m still glad that he is shaming other’s privacy practices and I hope they improve, it doesn’t come from a position of total innocence for him.
Is it hypocritical to do the best possible at any given situation? I think not.
Crybabies like Thom are generally dishonest and hypocritical though. If not everyone can have 100% protection then nobody should be protected in any way obviously, so much better. /s
Megol,
I don’t always agree with Thom, but I still think he made a fair point. Apple didn’t cause china to be repressive, but they’re at least somewhat complicit.
I almost missed the “/s”, but his entire comment was “/s”, it seems 😉
Hard line positions like yours are difficult to engage with. What should Apple do? Should they leave the Chinese market entirely? Because that’s what would need to happen to take on the Chinese government. Should all American companies follow? Should this be a government policy, enforced on American companies?
I’m not saying Apple made the right decision, nor am I saying they make the wrong one. I’m saying when you present a hard line, black and white position like that, it makes it very difficult to have any kind of conversation about all the gray in the middle.
At the very least, they should not be pretending to care about privacy. They’re pretending to care to get more business, but that is demonstrably a lie.
Just because staying in the Chinese market may be the “right thing to do” for the company doesn’t mean they get to claim to care about privacy.
What would happen if they left the Chinese market to protect privacy? Would a Chinese replacement company improve privacy? I’m not saying staying is “the right thing to do” for the company – I’m saying reality is far more complicated than simple either/or judgements.
Things this person leaves out.
Yes Apple moved the data over to Chinese servers. Was it mentioned in this article that Apple cleaned up the data BEFORE moving it over? They didn’t just hand it over “as is”.
Did they mention that a lot of the data in not viewable or recoverable by Apple? Even if Apple —wanted— to get to the data they cannot because they don’t own the keys so they can’t open the locks.
If someone wants to be truly HONEST about what Apple did and did not, they being TOTALLY honest. But that wouldn’t make for as good of a story now would it.
It’s not Apple that should be shamed. It’s the person that wrote the article. Declare EVERYTHING or shut the **** up.
Sabon,
For the sake of clarification, can you link to exactly what you are referring to with regards to cleaning up data? Most data can be incriminating in the hands of authoritarian regimes. I for one don’t take corporate claims at face value because they’re often misleading and wrong, including some of Tim Cook’s claims in the past. But I am curious if you have any details, how have they modified IOS & services in china to increase privacy?
You’re taking at face value the promises of a company which was already caught red handed lying about this, with iMessage encryption.
…but of course you’d do it… as No it isnt put it https://www.osnews.com/story/30019/china-blocks-whatsapp-broadening-online-censorship/#comment-649309
Dealing with China is problematic. They run the country the way they see fit which does not always fit in with our models. Apple is between a rock and a hard place w.r.t. China. They are cricitised for doing business there and they’d be cricitised (by a different bunch of people and investors) if they pulled out.
I have to accept (with gritted teeth) that trying to live these days without using anything that is made in China is pretty well impossible unless I live totally off grid and in a cave like a hermit. YMMV.
shotsman,
Yep, they’d be criticized either way. And to be sure the problem isn’t really specific to apple, china is sort of emblematic of the tragedy of the commons. Corporations make the same sort of calculations and use similar excuses “it doesn’t align with our values, but it’s the best we can do”. If only the powerful corporations would stand up for the values they purportedly care about, then china would be under huge economic pressure to do what’s right. However when china knows that few if any businesses are actually going to act on their “values”, it gives them free reign to keep abusing human rights. For a CEO headquartered in another country to say “it’s not our fault” is mighty convenient and doesn’t seed change!!
Similar excuses have been used to distance corporations from child labor or the insane levels of violence in the diamond industry, etc. We don’t hire children directly, we don’t kill people, we don’t write those laws, etc. But realistically the ongoing business partnerships are a subtle endorsement to continue those practices (our mouths say no, but our money says yes). Things CAN get better but that absolutely requires domestic corporations to step up, take some responsibility, and make some sacrifices. It’s easy to say that one cares, but the corporations, including apple, are just too damn greedy to vote with their money. If it were easy, the changes would already be done.
Same here. I started writing another rant about how we used to manufacture things here, but it’s a discussion for another time, haha.
Apple has been like this from the days post Apple II. At a publicity level they preach freedom in jeans and polo-neck whilst at the same time building one of the most closed computing paradigms out there. This preach vs practice has continued right up to the creation of the walled garden app strategy eagerly copied by Alphabet.. Microsoft with the geeky lawyer spawn “letter to homebrew” Gates on the other hand was positioned by default as the corporate “the man” whereas in fact they created a much more open computing ecosystem and this has continued to the recent trend toward prioritizing productivity vs windows in their mission. In a crazy ironic twist it seems that the most private mainstream non Linux OS is the “Chinese Government Edition” of Windows 10 :-O https://seekingalpha.com/article/4079952-windows-10-china-government-edition-microsoft-just-bought-time
Late to the party, but thought I should add my 0.02c. I actually find the suggestion that an American should direct employees to disobey Chinese law to represent a borderline imperialistic mindset. While I am happy to live in a country that values privacy (although not as much as we pretend), and wouldn’t choose to live in China, I don’t think it is up to Americans (or Dutch, or any other nationality) to demand that China takes the same view of privacy as we do in the west. I incidentally feel the same way about Google developing a censored search engine for China.
I think in the west, we need to consider the possibility that China may never change to become more “western” and that, if anything, we in the west are becoming more like the Chinese in that our governments are looking for more and more ways to curtail privacy. And no, I don’t count the sort of privacy that governments grant people against “corporate snooping”. Most western countries make the same demands of companies like Apple that the Chinese are making (see Australia).
mkone,
No, it’s not about breaking Chinese law, it’s about boycotting the market in protest of the laws that conflict with stated values. You don’t have to participate in those markets after all. Playing along is an implicit acknowledgement that the money is more important than one’s values. There are probably many people who are ok with that, and if so, so be it, Nevertheless it renders Tim Cook’s statements more disingenuous.than if his company had actually turned down the money to stand up for privacy. In other words, it’s easy for him to blame others who take profit over uncompromising privacy, but it’s hypocritical when apple chose more profits over uncompromising privacy.
I do agree here. For all the rights we love to preach on the surface, there are abusive forces acting within our own government. Snowen revealed quite alot about our government’s own disregard for the constitution.
Martin Jacques makes that argument. The West thinks its model is the only one that makes sense, but not even Japan or India has a “Western” model after modernization and economic liberation.
I’m pretty sure the modern snooping/surveillance state was Nazi Germany and the GDR…