“Where national law and international human rights standards differ, we follow the higher standard. Where they are in conflict, we respect national law while seeking to respect the principles of internationally recognised human rights.”
In other words, business as usual, more virtue signalling. This weasel word statement means they stand for nothing. They will still do business in the country. They are upholding no values if they allow national law to trump their ideals.
The challenged the FBI in court to protect the privacy and rights of their users, so you they can at least state they will challenge any such requests to the fullest extent of the law.
They could also commit to not enter markets where local law isn't compatible with human rights and "freedom of information and expression". Although the most relevant such country is China and no way are they leaving that market and in addition their whole supply chain is massively dependent on China.
Apple essentially failed to patch a current plaintext backdoor to iMessage end to end encryption (due to the fact that device backups, on by default, containing complete plaintext message history are NOT end to end encrypted and are uploaded to Apple with Apple keys each night) because they didn’t want to cross the FBI.
They're starting to move Pixel production to Vietnam. It's also less of a freedom of information and expression issue when the Play Store doesn't operate in China like the App Store does.
"We are committed for finding markets solutions to human rights. Apple Store fee in China is now 50% and the money goes to organizations supporting human rights."
I doesn't matter much as long as there is a list. Apple can even publish it's own list, then everybody can debate if this is a good list or bad list. Currently there is no list - no discussion.
It is possible (and in fact, expected) of companies that take these kinds of pledges to have a baseline set of human rights that most people (or at least most people on Apple's board) will agree on, even if there is ambiguity around the edges.
The alternative is saying, "we'll stand for this thing that we refuse to define in even vague terms, and as a result it will be impossible for anyone to evaluate whether or not we're succeeding, or even making progress."
If Apple can't determine even in broad terms what is and isn't a rights violation, then their declaration is meaningless. They don't need to decide for everyone, and not everyone needs to agree with them -- it's fine for other people and companies to come up with their own criteria. But Apple has to at least some internal idea of what they mean when they say they stand for something, otherwise it will be impossible for them to build real policies around the declaration.
And some of this honestly isn't that controversial among scholars. As an analogy, if I commit to avoiding stocking unhealthy products in my store, I don't need to know for certain whether or not coffee is healthy in order to say Cadbury Eggs are not -- pretty much everyone agrees on that. In the same way, we don't really need to debate whether or not healthcare is a human right to understand that forced abortions, forced monitoring and 'reeducation', and concentration camps for Uighurs are violations of their human rights.
Couple of honest questions to you (or anyone else reading this who thinks along the same lines).
Firstly, are you saying anyone who happened to be born in China is complicit in e.g. the crimes committed against Uighur population and thus doesn't deserve to be able to legally buy an Apple phone in their country?
Secondly, if Apple exits a non-free country, do you expect that to improve the situation? Make the country freer?
In China this would leave the population to local tech, which is pretty much owned by CCP and subject to its every whim—as opposed to Apple’s cooperating to the degree required to not break the law.
>Firstly, are you saying anyone who happened to be born in China is complicit in e.g. the crimes committed against Uighur population and thus doesn't deserve to be able to legally buy an Apple phone in their country?
I am not saying everyone in China is complicit in the Chinese government's human rights abuses. Purchasing a specific product from a specific company is not a right.
>Secondly, if Apple exits a non-free country, do you expect that to improve the situation? Make the country freer?
>In China this would leave the population to local tech, which is pretty much owned by CCP and subject to its every whim—as opposed to Apple’s cooperating to the degree required to not break the law.
I don't expect it to improve the situation, nor do I believe it's Apple's job to improve China. Apple's job is to have consistent beliefs about human rights if they're going to pretend to care about them.
>What's the benefit to be had here?
The benefit is Apple puts their money where their mouth is. Saying they care about human rights and then cooperating with a serial abuser renders their policy irrelevant.
Apple doesn't help prop up an authoritarian regime? CCP gonna CCP, but at least Apple's hands are clean. It's not any individual Chinese citizen's fault, but they unfortunately have to deal with the consequences of an illiberal, ruthless regime.
If the CCP believed that Apple's absence would strengthen the regime, then they would get rid of Apple. Clearly they think it's in their best interest to have Apple around. You can disagree with them, but I think the CCP is much better positioned to know what's in their interest than we are.
You are granting CCP omniscience, power and integrity they don't have.
Apple probably came to China to expand their market, had enough lawyers to navigate the muddy bureaucracy, CCP could block them regardless but decided to let them open shops and profit from taxes for now. Many Chinese would buy Apple products overseas in HK or Taiwan anyway; CCP is powerless to stop it and would not mind a share of the sales.
CCP may be blind to Western values brought in by Apple, or discount their influence, or tolerate them for now because it is economically lucrative.
"We refuse to put ourselves in a position where we can be compelled to violate human rights." - such as the position of arbiter of what may run on your phone.
I mean if they want to make these kinds of statements then yeah, kinda. Because following national laws even when you disagree with them is the default. I don't fault anyone for taking this position since I don't think anyone is ever obligated to self-sacrifice. But civil disobedience is the act of protest and something deserving of praise.
Unless their position is "all countries equally violate human rights", they should minimize their footprint in countries with egregious human rights violations. They get to decide which countries go onto that list. Maybe they think China has an excellent record, or is no worse than others. If so, let them state that.
It bad to violate human rights to comply with local laws of a country.
But it's even worse to do that and claim that you are upholding the human rights.
What they should do is either: be honest and say that they comply with local laws of a country even if they think they violate human rights; or don't violate human rights.
If you live in China and care about privacy, get an iPhone. The local offerings (Huawei, etc) are compromised, and Google's stuff is blocked.
Apple's in a tough spot, but the iPhone is one of a few remaining viable choices that isn't dominated by the PRC and why roll Apple for that? What's the plan if Apple pulls out?
In an international human rights context, typically, freedom of speech is a qualified right as opposed to an absolute right. In other words it can be curtailed to an extent if it comes into conflict with other human rights.
It’s not a point of view, it’s the legal position of at least the European Convention on Human Rights/UK Human Rights Act and I believe also the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
We have the freedom to express ourselves by giving Apple $99/yr to share our open source apps, apps which ultimately further enrich their platform.
If you are poor and have been donated an iPhone, then express yourself somewhere else.
And if you have expressed yourself on macOS in the past, now pay up there too, or we are going to suggest that your art is dangerous to view on our devices, and we'll make it difficult [1] to run.
Nathalie Lawhead's article [2] is a heartbreaking exploration of how open source developers and artists experience Apple's chokehold.
There is also the other (more important than opensource) kool-aid about how "green" Apple is. Meanwhile they're choking the repair industry which is reducing the e-waste on our planet. And they give themselves a gold star on their so called "report card" on the environmental impact of their products. The irony..
Come on..You get listing and visibility and distribution worldwide, Consumers don't have to worry about your credentials and bonafides because app store due diligence checks help keep out malicious and fraudulent apps.
People can download appstore apps without worry as opposed to some random guy publishing an open source app that most don't have time or expertise to vet.
You can't see how that's a double edged sword though?
I buy a device, I even buy a special computer so I can build programs for the device... and now I have to pay $99/year just to comfortably run my own program on my own device? Even worse, I can't even continue to digitally interface with my own customers, people who Apple never helped me land as clients, without passing through Apple's arbitrary store rules AND paying them 30%?
That's fucking dog shit and it's going to have to change, especially given that they have 50% of the market in the US.
Yes, there are costs associated with running the App Store, but I would be very surprised if those costs came anywhere near what Apple is charging devs.
I don’t feel that Apple shouldn’t charge at all, only that what they’re charging is unreasonably high.
So the linked news story makes it sound like this document was proposed and accepted:
> At its February annual general meeting a shareholder proposal calling on Apple to publicly commit “to respect freedom of expression as a human right” received more than 40 percent support from shareholders.
> According to The Financial Times, Apple's board of directors approved the policy and published it ahead of a deadline of Sept. 5 for shareholders to submit motions for next year's investor meeting.
When attempting to read the document through the link in the story, I get directed to Reuters who says:
> While it was defeated, it gained 40.6% of votes cast - far more than similar motions put forward previously and enough to push the company to respond, experts said.
So, this sounds like Apple may have published the proposal but still actually declined it?
Has this been coupled with any actual policy changes, donations, or new products? Is there anything concrete that Apple is going to do differently now that it's made this statement?
And when the average user forgets their iCloud password and loses their everything? Apple decided the trade off for that is worth it, and they provide an alternative for people who want fully encrypted backups: iTunes local backups.
That doesn’t matter when everyone else you iMessage with has their (on by default!) non-e2e iCloud device backups enabled.
Your entire chat history plaintext gets made available to the feds without a warrant anyway, regardless of the settings on your own device—the plaintext escrow then happens on the device at the other end of the conversation pair.
Apple does not care about your privacy. There was a plan to fix this glaring what-amounts-to-a-backdoor in iMessage encryption, but they cancelled it to avoid crossing the FBI.
The Reuters reporting on the matter cited six sources.
Tarnished to the tune of attention received for anti-competitive behavior. I'm sure you realized that's what I was referring to, but trying to dunk on me with an inane "yeah but they're rich" response was too hard to resist I guess?
(As long as we can extract a 30% cut from the platform the information is on by removing the freedom of our users to install what they want on their devices.)
> At its February annual general meeting a shareholder proposal calling on Apple to publicly commit “to respect freedom of expression as a human right” received more than 40 percent support from shareholders.
I have been such an Apple fan over the years. The recent negative press Apple is getting doesn't affect me in any meaningful way. At the same time it does hit home that a device I use for many hours of the day is heavily controlled by their internal company policies.
I always felt like free software was a nice concept I didn't really care about day to day, my opinion is changing on that. I am really excited by a usable Linux on mobile offering.
All empty words. Don't look at what they say, look at what they do; Apple has a long history of acquiescing to the CCP's every demand so that they can keep their access to the Chinese market.
They probably just put this out because they ran some focus groups and determined that this would improve their image among American / European consumers.
In the course of trying to determine whether a specific company was participating and profiting from human rights abuses in China just earlier this morning, I came across this mention of Apple:
There are no human rights. Only privileges. Some have more, some less. The most powerful ones give and take them as they see fit and is convenient to them. It has always been so. Laws are for the masses.
“Where national law and international human rights standards differ, we follow the higher standard. Where they are in conflict, we respect national law while seeking to respect the principles of internationally recognised human rights.”
In other words, business as usual, more virtue signalling. This weasel word statement means they stand for nothing. They will still do business in the country. They are upholding no values if they allow national law to trump their ideals.