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buzzfeednews

Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China

Reporter:Alex Kantrowitz   Editor:John Paczkowski

“Chinese netizens hail Apple’s removal of app that aids HK rioters."

That was how the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party outlet, covered Apple
’s removal of HKmap.live, an app that helped Hong Kong protesters track
police, from the iOS App Store. It was emblematic of the adulatory coverage
news outlets controlled by the Chinese government have bestowed on Apple this
week.

“Apple highly values the Chinese market and removing the controversial app
is a smart move,” an analyst said in the article, driving home the party’s
approval.

In the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper, the
story “Apple removes app which helped HK rioters elude police” was the
business section’s most read story Friday.

Apple’s recent actions in China are a continuation of the company’s
years-long practice of appeasing Beijing. To do business in China, the
company adopts to local dictates, distasteful as they may be to its CEO Tim
Cook, an outspoken gay rights advocate and privacy crusader. It's an ironic
inversion of a longstanding argument in the West that by bringing China into
the world trade system, the country would adopt western values. Instead,
China is asking tech companies to adopt its values — and Apple is willing to
pay that price.

In early 2018 as development on Apple’s slate of exclusive Apple TV+
programming was underway, the company’s leadership gave guidance to the
creators of some of those shows to avoid portraying China in a poor light,
BuzzFeed News has learned. Sources in position to know said the instruction
was communicated by Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of internet software and services,
and Morgan Wandell, its head of international content development. It was
part of Apple's ongoing efforts to remain in China’s good graces after a
2016 incident in which Beijing shut down Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes
Movies six months after they debuted in the country.

A spokesperson for Apple declined comment.

"They all do it. They have to if they want to play in that market."
Apple’s tip toeing around the Chinese government isn’t unusual in
Hollywood. It’s an accepted practice. "They all do it," one showrunner who
was not affiliated with Apple told BuzzFeed News. "They have to if they want
to play in that market. And they all want to play in that market. Who
wouldn't?"

For Apple, which is in many ways already playing in that market and reliant
on China for tens of billions in annual sales and the manufacture of the
hundreds of millions of iPhones it sells around the world each year, it is
particularly important to avoid running afoul of Chinese government. And as we
’ve seen over the past week, it is particularly vigilant about apps.

Developers told BuzzFeed News the incidents are hardly anomalies.

“We just get a phone call from Apple and they say ‘We just got a call from
the Chinese government’ and five minutes later our app is off the App Store,
” one US technology executive told BuzzFeed News. “It’s not a line of
communication that would be open to any discussion.”

“They have so much market power in general and they wield that pretty
indiscriminately,” the US technology executive said of Apple.

The removal of HKmap.live was one of a series of actions Apple took at China’
s instigation in the past week. Apple removed the Quartz app from its app
store in China — “Presumably because of the excellent work our team in Hong
Kong has been doing covering the protests,” Quartz technology editor Mike
Murphy said — and removed the Taiwan flag emoji for iOS users in Hong Kong.

These were hardly the first of their kind. In the second half of 2018, Apple
challenged or rejected just two of 56 app takedown requests from China,
removing 517 apps at the government’s behest, according to the company’s
transparency report. Apple said the vast majority of these apps were for porn
and gambling, but it has also removed an unspecified number of virtual
private networking and news apps. Apple provided customer data to the Chinese
government 96% of the time when it asked about a device, and 98% of the time
when it asked about an account. In the US, those numbers were around 80% and
the US government did not make any app removal requests.

In September, Apple seemed to brush off the seriousness of an exploit attack
directed at the Uighur ethnic minority. “The sophisticated attack was
narrowly focused, not a broad-based exploit of iPhones ‘en masse,’” Apple
said in a blog post acknowledging the attack. “The attack affected fewer
than a dozen websites that focus on content related to the Uighur community.”

The blog post infuriated critics, who called out Apple’s appeasement of the
Chinese government and seemingly callous attitude toward the plight of the
Uighurs. “Apple's response to this massive hack of iPhones is 'don't worry,
it only affected the Uighur community'” Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open
Markets Institute, said at the time. “WTF,” Stoller added.

In 2018, the iPhone maker placed its iCloud storage and cryptographic keys
for Chinese users in China, giving the government easier access to its
customers’ data than when it was stored in the US. The company has also
disappeared a song about Tiananmen Square from Apple Music in China and
removed the New York Times app in the country.

"Given how authentically good Apple is at protecting user privacy, it's very
dismaying to see it doing the wrong thing in other areas."
“Given how authentically good Apple is at protecting user privacy, it's very
dismaying to see it doing the wrong thing in other areas, especially its
relationship with the [Chinese Communist Party],” one former Apple employee
told BuzzFeed News.

Apple is not the only US institution to run into controversy trying to
maintain its values while remaining in the Chinese government’s good graces.

The National Basketball Association incurred China’s ire when Houston
Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong
protesters this month. Known for their outspokenness, the NBA’s stars
largely stayed mum on the issue, a reporter was shut down when asking about
it, and fans were kicked out of arenas for bringing in messaging supporting
the protests. Google, meanwhile, removed a game in which users could play as
Hong Kong protesters from its Play Store. And game maker Blizzard faced a
boycott after it suspended a player who supported Hong Kong protesters.

When Tim Cook tried to explain away its actions this week by saying
protesters were using HKmap.live to “maliciously to target individual
officers for violence” without providing evidence, even longtime Apple
observer and blogger John Gruber, couldn’t stomach it.

“I can’t recall an Apple memo or statement that crumbles so quickly under
scrutiny,” Gruber wrote. “For a company that usually measures umpteen times
before cutting anything, it’s both sad and startling.”

蘋果除了應中國政府要求
刪除了爭議應用程式，用以通過商業批准

在2018年初蘋果獨家線上串流節目製作中
部分製作人被蘋果高級主管告知
避免中國刻板印象，維護與中國良好關係

http://bit.ly/32djgiv
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怎麼可能，同志最講人權了
Tim Cook就是同志

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你沒有朋友，可能是你就不想要交朋友
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