That’s almost certainly not the reason. Apple definitely has access to all of the data that isn’t encrypted by the phones themselves, whether the data is stored in a data center physically in China, the USA, or Bangladesh. VPNs are no doubt set up bridging the networks.
By default, the phones don’t encrypt the data in a way that Apple cannot access. In the case of the San Bernardino shooter, the phone was set to a special extra-private mode where the phone used an encryption key generated from and stored in a chip on the phone to lock the data.
So no, if Apple physically has the data in China, the Chinese government plans to just demand access at their whim to the parts that Apple can access. I suppose they could enable the harder encryption but if you do that, you cannot recover the data that was on the phone if the phone itself was lost. For most users, that’s not a worthy tradeoff. I feel that my personal data would more likely exonerate me than condemn me if law enforcement ever got access to it, so am not particularly concerned.
well for starters by the time anything that the nsa does gets to the public its all ready at least 3 or 4 generations obsolete electronically I mean by now there on appleslicer 10.1 while were just finding out about 1 or 2.0
in samuela’s case he doesn’t need to worry since he doesn’t live in a country where innocence is subjective to the current mood of the investigator whos trained that no ones innocent in the first place
M’kay, let me share a tidbit about working in China circa 1990. For you kids, back then fax was still a very important method of communication and for signing agreements and such not. I mean, there was email, but not everyone had email back in the dark ages, and PDF scans (or just a photo from your cell phone) were not yet ubiquitous. We had a very important fax come in that was effectively a signed contract, and it was mislaid. And the customer was trying to back out of the contract a week later, and we couldn’t find the damned thing. One of our staff went in person to the “Bureau of Faxes” or whatever it was called in our village of about 20 million inhabitants. A little cash exchanged hands. Lo, and behold, the “Bureau of Faxes” was able to find that specific fax based on our corporate fax number, and gave us a copy.
Nearly 20 years later, with almost everything digitized and China is at minimum a leader if not THE leader in big data. Well, I don’t want to jump to hasty conclusions for which I have no proof, but will let you connect the necessary dots as required.
The frustrating thing is that a society that surveils everyone wouldn’t be that bad if you could use that to fight corruption. If the officials in power were vulnerable to having their wrongful and bad decisions reviewed, with everything faithfully recorded so they can’t lie, we’d have a far more efficient and just society.
This is what it is and nothing more. The realities of doing business in China are different from the realities of doing business elsewhere. Don’t like it? Don’t do business in China. Google found that out the hard way.
Just know that it doesn’t necessarily end there. When a company agrees to do business in China, it’s agreeing to do business the Chinese way. That means storing user data on government servers, but it means other things, too, like tolerating corruption and hardball politics that may have to be played in order to maintain the privilege of having access to this market. This is true of doing business in many other countries as well, of course.
This story was featured on China Uncensored this week, but I won’t post the video here as it has a bunch of other stuff in it. They used this article though so figured I’d post some of the stuff from that.
This part is funny…it’s the Global Times take on all of this (always good for a laugh):
I was going to say that you have to be joking, but I’m sure you’re not. Surveilling everyone in hopes of cracking down on the very small percentage of people who are both in positions of power and are corrupt is the very definition of a dragnet.
So, when user data is stored on servers in the US, Apple is still able to protect that user data from snooping by US authorities. Why would the same not also be true of Apple in China?
Well, if you read the article I linked to you’d see that they WILL be able to keep US authorities from snooping on Chinese data in China, just like they do back in the states. So…win!
