Apple has removed HKmap.live, a crowdsourced mapping app widely used by Hong Kong residents, from the App Store. The app and accompanying web service has been used to mark the locations of police and inform about street closures during the ongoing pro-democracy protests that have engulfed Hong Kong this year.
Apple initially rejected HKmap.live from the App Store earlier this month, then reversed its decision a few days later. Now it has reversed its reversal.
Tim Cook is a coward.
> Tim Cook is a coward.
China doesn’t have to land a soldier. Just pull the chain attached to the chocker.
Unbelievable! A totalitarian, authoritarian government doesn’t want its citizens to keep track of police activity and orders companies to obey the law if they want to do business there? Say it aint so! News at 11.
Thanks, pro-fascist dweeb!
Ah, ad hominem. Thank you for showing just what a skilled argument you can put together. Congratulations. I shall now disregard anything else you say, as you clearly cannot say anything of use.
So in this context, do we want American companies to obey other countries’ laws or not? And should we expect Chinese companies to obey our laws in the west?
I do expect American companies to follow the laws of other nations, to an extent, but I also expect them to try to mitigate a foreign nations ability to put such limitations on them.
Apple could have largely avoided this whole controversy by making it easy to sideload applications, so that removing the app from their own app store wouldn’t ban users from accessing it. That they exert so much control on their platform means they are actual active participants in oppressing people in Hong Kong.
Drumhellar,
Exactly!! I wish the media at large would actually connect the dots and talk about this problem. I really worry that people are taking these restrictions for granted, and that’s only going to encourage more corporations to impose more restrictions on more devices.
Or, those who created this application could have (an should have!) made it a web page instead of a mobile app that any vendor could then control. Especially if they’re trying to specialize in tracking police and protest activity or other actions that I’m sure the Chinese government would find objectionable, one would have thought they’d have structured their service around the most open medium possible. Instead, they gave vendors control by putting it through an app store in the first place.
darknexus,
Not that I can read any of it, but isn’t that what this is? https://hkmap.live/
Anyways, when it comes to app censorship, I really think victim-blaming is the wrong approach. Traditionally throughout personal computing history, application development really is an “open medium”. It’s only with the development of walled gardens and platform restrictions that app development & distribution became closed. By refusing to budge on its walled garden restrictions against owners & developers, apple is intrinsically valuing it’s control over users as being more important than user freedom from app censorship.
We’re still in the early days of app censorship, but if we continue to ignore the tech giants taking away owner freedoms, then I am afraid that this problem is likely to get worse in the coming years as it becomes “the norm”.