Apple’s chinoiserie

Apple sold everything customers saved on iCloud to a Chinese company. Summary of the article by Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi for The New York Times , published by La Verità

Apple makes privacy protection its strong point. Inclusion and diversity have been part of the "opening" policy of the Cupertino company for decades, which produces rainbow and multiracial commercials. But all this disappears in front of China .

Apple makes a fifth of its profits in China, 55 billion dollars a year, and produces almost all of its iPhones, iPads and Macs in the Asian giant. In exchange, however, the communist regime is demanding a lot from the Californian company. First of all, it demands the censorship of all apps deemed inconvenient: since 2017, Apple has deleted over 55,000 applications from its Chinese App store

From June 2018 to June 2020, it approved 91 percent of Chinese government requests and removed 1,217 apps as a result. In the same period, in the rest of the world, it removed 253. Since 2017, it has deleted 600 news apps. Apple claims to have eliminated "only" 70 because, explains the NYT, Cupertino only counts those that it makes disappear at the request of the government and not "those that it removes even before the Chinese internet censors protest".

Not only that, in defiance of American laws and privacy rhetoric, Apple has sold everything that customers save on iCloud to a Chinese state-owned company: personal data, photos, chats, videos, phone numbers, bank account numbers. and location of users. The data is encrypted, of course, but the scheme has physical access to the servers and keys to decrypt the information. "If the government wants the data, it just has to get it."

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/le-cineserie-di-apple/ on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:48:58 +0000.