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Credit to Author: Louise Matsakis| Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 20:16:47 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n As pro-democracy protests continue in Hong Kong, the tech giant\u2019s troubling relationship with an authoritarian regime has come into focus.<\/p>\n Last October, as Facebook grappled with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal<\/a>, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech<\/a> in Brussels in which he sought to distance the iPhone maker from its peers. Cook railed against the \u201cdata industrial complex,\u201d and chastised companies like Google and Facebook for collecting personal information<\/a> from users and weaponizing it against them. \u201cThis is surveillance,\u201d he said. \u201cThis should make us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us.\u201d<\/p>\n The speech was meant to reaffirm Apple\u2019s position in Silicon Valley as the Patron Saint of Privacy, the company willing to protect user data while others profit from it. In many ways, that reputation is well-earned. After all, Apple refused to help<\/a> the FBI break into an iPhone that belonged to one of the alleged perpetrators of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack. Its devices are among the most secure<\/a> in the world, and its has aggressively curbed data-tracking<\/a> in its own apps. But the company\u2019s recent actions in China demonstrate that Apple\u2019s privacy, security, and human rights virtues appear to have a limit. They don\u2019t always extend beyond Beijing\u2019s borders.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Apple removed<\/a> HKmap.live\u2014an app that pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong used to track police activity\u2014from its iOS App Store, after an op-ed<\/a> criticizing the tool was published in People\u2019s Daily<\/em>, the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s flagship newspaper. Apple also removed<\/a> the Quartz news app from its China App Store, after the outlet extensively covered the protest movement in Hong Kong. Around the same time, Apple began hiding the Taiwan flag<\/a> from users in Hong Kong and Macau; the Chinese Communist Party asserts that Taiwan is formally part of the country under its One-China policy. (The emoji was previously banned only on the mainland<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Apple says it removed HK.map.live not because of pressure from China, but because it posed a safety risk. \u201cMany concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it,\u201d an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cThe app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n In an internal letter to employees, Tim Cook reiterated<\/a> that Apple had credible reason to believe HK.map.live was \u201cwas being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence.\u201d But protest leaders<\/a>, as well as Charles Mok<\/a>, Hong Kong\u2019s IT legislator, disputed that the app, which relies on crowdsourced information and doesn\u2019t identify individual police officials, legitimately posed a danger. \u201cI can\u2019t recall an Apple memo or statement that crumbles so quickly under scrutiny,\u201d wrote<\/a> John Gruber, an influential Apple commentator, referring to Cook\u2019s letter. \u201cFor a company that usually measures umpteen times before cutting anything, it\u2019s both sad and startling.\u201d<\/p>\n And last week, Buzzfeed News reported<\/a> that Apple told some Apple TV+<\/a> show developers in 2018 to avoid portraying China in a poor light, as other studios<\/a> have in the past. \u201cThat really says [Chinese] censorship is reaching audiences outside of China,\u201d says Yaqui Wang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who studies the country. \u201cThose shows are not just watched by Chinese people. Americans should be worried about this.\u201d Apple declined to comment on Buzzfeed's reporting.<\/p>\n Taken together, the decisions show Apple's acute concern about upsetting China\u2019s leaders. \u201cOver the past several years, Apple has made a series of concessions in the realm of free speech and privacy protection,\u201d says Wang. \u201cEvery time you concede, it\u2019s a signal to the Chinese government that you are open to more submission.\u201d Last year, to comply with local laws, Apple began storing<\/a> data and keys to Chinese iCloud accounts in China, making it easier for the government to potentially obtain information on its citizens. And in 2017, Apple removed<\/a> apps from The New York Times<\/em> from its Chinese App Store, as well as hundreds of virtual private networks<\/a> that may have allowed Chinese users to access content blocked by the country\u2019s internet censors. The latter are illegal in the country.<\/p>\n Unlike other American tech giants, which have largely failed to enter the country, Apple\u2019s business relies heavily on China. Its iPhones and other gadgets are largely manufactured and assembled there, and it earned almost $44 billion<\/a> in sales in the country during the 12-month period ending in June. China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan together constitute Apple's second-largest market<\/a> after the United States. As pro-democracy demonstrations have continued in Hong Kong for months, Apple has become one of many international corporations<\/a> caught between their stated democratic values and lucrative business interests.<\/p>\n That includes Google, which was reportedly criticized by its own employees this week for removing a pro-Hong Kong mobile game, The Revolution of Our Times<\/a>, from the Google Play Store. Earlier this year, Google cancelled<\/a> its project to create a censored Chinese search engine<\/a> in the country after sustained backlash<\/a> from workers and scrutiny from US lawmakers. But if Apple employees similarly objected to their employer\u2019s actions in the region, it couldn\u2019t easily back out of working there. Apple needs China, and that puts it in an inherently troubling position.<\/p>\n Take what happened in August, when Google researchers first revealed a series of astonishing iPhone vulnerabilities<\/a> that compromised a person\u2019s phone almost instantly if they visited certain websites. Several news outlets reported<\/a> the exploits had been used to target China\u2019s minority Uighur population, more than a million members of whom have been thrown into concentration camps<\/a> in the western Xinjiang province. When Apple finally released a statement<\/a> addressing the vulnerabilities, it acknowledged that Uighurs had been their intended target, but the words \u201cChina\u201d and \u201chuman rights\u201d didn\u2019t appear. Apple also failed to acknowledge the brutal surveillance techniques<\/a> the Muslim minority group and other religious and ethic minorities have endured in China for years.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the recent criticism around Safe Browsing, a feature Apple has used in its Safari web browser for over a decade to warn people when they may be visiting a malicious website. For most Safari users around the world, the tool relies on Google, which maintains a list of websites it has identified as potentially malicious or harmful. When Apple thinks you\u2019ve visited one, it checks the URL against Google's database. If there\u2019s a match, Apple displays a warning. For users in China, Safe Browsing relies on a database compiled instead by Tencent, a Chinese internet company with ties to the government. The relationship between the two corporations wasn\u2019t widely known in the United States until this week.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just kind of like one day, Tencent appears\u2014that was concerning,\u201d says Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. (Apple announced the partnership to Chinese media organizations when it was formed in 2017.) Green worries Tencent could potentially use Safe Browsing to monitor whether iPhone users in China visit certain websites, since it ultimately controls what ends up on its list of malicious URLs. The Chinese government already widely surveils citizens' digital habits via other means<\/a>. Apple acknowledged that a person's IP addresses, and therefore their locations, are also shared with Tencent if they land on a malicious site. In a statement, Apple\u2019s spokesperson said the \u201cactual URL of a website you visit is never shared with a safe browsing provider and the feature can be turned off.\u201d<\/p>\n "It\u2019s impossible as a tech company to be neutral anymore; there is no neutral."<\/p>\n Samm Sacks, New America<\/p>\n China's complicated politics present problems not just for Apple and other tech companies<\/a>, but for any corporation that courts consumers in the country. Earlier this month, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, was forced to delete a tweet in support of the Hong Kong protests. Tencent and Chinese state media later halted digital streaming<\/a> of NBA preseason games, and Morey<\/a> and the NBA issued an apology. Two days later, the video game company Activision Blizzard suspended<\/a> Blitzchung, a professional esports player, after he similarly expressed support for the pro-democracy movement in the city.<\/p>\n But for Apple, the stakes are higher than just public relations. Chinese citizens store data about nearly every aspect of their lives on their iPhones.<\/p>\n "It\u2019s impossible as a tech company to be neutral anymore; there is no neutral. And so the question is: Do you come down on the side of protestors in one of your biggest markets in the world, or do you come down on the side of police and the Chinese government," says Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity policy and China digital economy fellow at the think tank New America. "It\u2019s almost a lose-lose situation."<\/p>\n Apple, for its part, has argued that its presence in China \u201chelps promote greater openness and facilities the free flow of ideas and information,\u201d according to a 2017 letter<\/a> written by Cynthia Hogan, Apple\u2019s vice president for public policy and government affairs, which was sent to US Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Ted Cruz. \u201cWe are convinced that Apple can best promote fundamental rights, including the right of free expression, by being engaged even where we may disagree with a particular country\u2019s law.\u201d<\/p>\n