Rotten Apple

Apple under fire for moving iCloud data to China: Apple's latest move has privacy advocates and human rights groups worried.

by Sherisse Pham

The U.S. company is moving iCloud accounts registered in mainland China to state-run Chinese servers on Wednesday along with the digital keys needed to unlock them.
"The changes being made to iCloud are the latest indication that China's repressive legal environment is making it difficult for Apple to uphold its commitments to user privacy and security," Amnesty International warned in a statement Tuesday.
The criticism highlights the tradeoffs major international companies are making in order to do business in China, which is a huge market and vital manufacturing base for Apple.
In the past, if Chinese authorities wanted to access Apple's user data, they had to go through an international legal process and comply with U.S. laws on user rights, according to Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which studies the intersection of digital policy and human rights.
"They will no longer have to do so if iCloud and cryptographic keys are located in China's jurisdiction," he told CNNMoney.
The company taking over Apple's Chinese iCloud operations is Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which is owned by the government of Guizhou province. 

GCBD did not respond to requests for comment.
The change only affects iCloud accounts that are registered in mainland China.
Apple made the move to comply with China's latest regulations on cloud services. 

A controversial cybersecurity law, which went into effect last June, requires companies to keep all data in the country. 

Beijing has said the measures are necessary to help prevent crime and terrorism, and protect Chinese citizens' privacy.
The problem with Chinese cybersecurity laws, Deibert said, is that they also require companies operating in China "to turn over user data to state authorities on demand -- Apple now included."
Other big U.S. tech companies have had to take similar steps -- Amazon and Microsoft also struck partnerships with Chinese companies to operate their cloud services in the country.
"Our choice was to offer iCloud under the new laws or discontinue offering the service," an Apple spokesman told CNN. 

The company decided to keep iCloud in China, because cutting it off "would result in a bad user experience and less data security and privacy for our Chinese customers," he said.
Apple users typically use iCloud to store data such as music, photos and contacts.
That information can be extremely sensitive. 

Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders urged China-based journalists to change the country associated with their iCloud accounts -- which is an option for non-Chinese citizens, according to Apple -- or to close them down entirely.
Human rights groups also highlighted the difficult ethical positions Apple could find itself in under the new iCloud arrangement in China.
The company has fought for privacy rights in the Unites States. 

It publicly opposed a judge's order to break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists who carried out the deadly attack in San Bernardino in December 2016, calling the directive "an overreach by the US government."
At the time, CEO Tim Cook pretentiously said complying with the order would have required Apple to build "a backdoor to the iPhone ... something we consider too dangerous to create."
Human Rights Watch questioned whether the company would take similar steps to try to protect users' iCloud information in China, where similar privacy rights don't exist.
"Will Apple challenge laws adopted by the Chinese government that give authorities vast access to that data, especially with respect to encrypted keys that authorities will likely demand?" asked Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch.

Apple declined to answer that question directly,.
"Apple has not created nor were we requested to create any backdoors and Apple will continue to retain control over the encryption keys to iCloud data," the Apple spokesman said.
Rights groups and privacy advocates are not convinced.
"China is an authoritarian country with a long track record of problematic human rights abuses, and extensive censorship and surveillance practices," Deibert said.
Apple users in China should take "extra and possibly inconvenient precautions not to store sensitive data on Apple's iCloud," he advised.
Most of those users have already accepted the new status quo, according to Apple. 

So far, more than 99.9% of iCloud users in China have chosen to continue using the service, the Apple spokesman said.

Kowtowing to China’s Despots

Apple bans iPhone ads from Chinese newspapers critical of China
Apple has interfered with advertising campaigns cellphone carriers in Australia posted in local Chinese-language media outlets.

By Malcolm Owen

The general manager of The Vision China Times, Maree Ma, was informed in August 2016 that Apple did not want its products to feature in any advertising by carriers in the newspaper, reports The Australian. 

Ma, who also manages advertising for the publication, notes the last time an iPhone ad appeared was in October 2015, for the iPhone 6s.
"Since then, when Telstra runs their iPhone ads, they do not place any with our paper," said Ma. "There was a campaign last year in 2016 we missed out on."
Carriers still advertise with the newspaper, but leave out any advertising that show Apple products, Ma says. 

Marketing efforts that do show the iPhone still appear in other publications. 

Ma believes that, as these ads appear in "Beijing-aligned" or "PRC government-influenced" Australian-Chinese media, The Vision China Times has effectively been "blacklisted" by Apple "for political reasons as they are trying to protect their business in China."
The Epoch Times has seemingly been targeted in a similar way, with advertising from carriers placed without any reference to iPhones. 

In October 2015, the organization was expecting to gain a contract for the iPhone 6s on Telstra along with other outlets, but the deal failed to go through.
"We have never had issues with Telstra, but then at the last minute they had to pull out," a spokesperson for the Epoch Times advised. 

"Then we asked why. (Our advertising agent) said it's actually from Apple."
John Fitzgerald, a Swinburne University professor of Chinese soft power, suggests this is evidence that China is attempting to increase its media control outside its borders. 

"I would not be surprised if advertisers doing business in China were considering where their products appeared, considering Beijing's strict media controls," said the professor.
This is not the first time that the Chinese government has applied pressure on advertisers to stop advertising in critical publications. 

In 2014, a Hong Kong newspaper claimed two London-based banks stopped advertising after receiving such pressure, though the banks and a Chinese government official denied this was the case.
China is a major market for Apple, bringing in $16.23 billion of revenue in the last quarterly financial results, and poised to overtake the revenue generated by Europe. 

In order to operate in the market, Apple has to appease the country's government, one that is known to censor media it deems unacceptable or too critical.
One example of China's censorship activities against its critics is the demand received by Apple in December to pull the New York Times app from the App Store. 

The English and Chinese versions of the app were taken down on December 23 for allegedly violating local regulations, at a time when the publication was working on a number of stories about "hidden perks and subsidies" provided by the government to local producers.
Apple has also previously pulled access to its iTunes Movies and iBooks stores, with the store closures mandated by a government agency in an attempt to control media distribution.