Hong Kong protesters have a tortured relationship with Apple. While the iPhone’s AirDrop feature has helped protesters spread messages quickly in crowded situations, the U.S. tech giant has also thrown obstacles on its way, especially when it removed a real-time protest map app from its app store last year.
Now, the city’s democracy activists fear Apple will again actively hamper the protest movement.
Over the weekend, more than 600,000 voted in the opposition primary, an unofficial election that also served as a protest against the city’s national security law imposed last month by Beijing. The city will hold legislative elections in September. The main organizers had developed their own voting platform, called PopVote, with an app for iOS and Android. While the Android app was quickly approved by the Google Play store, the iOS app was initially rejected due to various code issues. PopVote developers resubmitted the app with the required changes in a matter of hours, but Apple never heard from anyone again despite multiple attempts to contact the company, according to Edwin Chu, an IT advisor to the voting platform. . “We believe that Apple is censoring it,” Chu said.
Before the survey, local officials warned that it could be considered a violation of the new law, and the Beijing liaison office yesterday condemned the exercise as “illegal.” Apple has not responded to a request for comment.
Apple has had to walk a tightrope between its commitment to user rights and appease China, on which it relies heavily as both a market and a manufacturer. He regularly censors apps on his Chinese on-demand app store in Beijing, including dozens of VPNs in 2017 and the Quartz app last year. It also removed the Taiwan flag emoji from its keyboard for Hong Kong and Macau users.
After the Hong Kong government last week gave the police vastly expanded powers (exclusive Quartz membership) under national security law, including ordering platforms and Internet service providers to remove content and deliver information from Users, major technology companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook announced that they would stop the processing of data requests by Hong Kong authorities. Notably absent was Apple, which only said it was “evaluating” the impact of the new legislation.
“What do the first three have in common?” asked Andy Yen, CEO of the Swiss secure email service ProtonMail, referring to Google, Twitter and Facebook. “They are banned in China. At the end of the day, it really comes down to the level of economic influence that the Chinese government has on the company. ”
And Apple has made a strong commitment to China, a strategy designed by Tim Cook, now its CEO, shortly after joining the company two decades ago and taking over its operations. Most of its factories are there, and as of last year, almost half of its key suppliers for basic supplies like chips and glass are based in China. Cook even took over as chairman of the board of business school at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Apple has argued in the past that its presence in China, even under Beijing’s limitations, still serves the people of China.
Apple’s approach to Hong Kong under the new law could provide clues to what other tech companies will do, as the city’s future of the internet increasingly depends not only on how foreign governments react to Beijing’s aggressive moves, but also of the political decisions of the main technological giants. The way things are going for the city’s internet will also be an important barometer of Beijing’s attempts to shape global cyberspace.
“Hong Kong is a Chinese border that exports its firewall and standards to the world,” said Glacier Kwong, spokesman for the Hong Kong digital rights group Keyboard Frontline.
With Beijing effectively bringing Hong Kong under its full control, it will be increasingly difficult for foreign tech companies to maintain a presence in the city while remaining committed to the ideals of an open Internet, data privacy, and freedom of expression. . They are likely to face harsh options soon: comply with requests from the Hong Kong government to censor content and deliver user data; defy the government and risk fines, incarceration of staff and total expulsion; or leaving and leaving Hong Kong for Chinese services.
“It is a situation where companies have to decide what bad options they want to choose,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, director of Ranking Digital Rights in New America. “It is difficult to see how they can stay in Hong Kong and not be complicit.”
Hong Kong, whose fate has always been in the hands of forces greater than itself, must now contend with the reality that tech companies’ business considerations will weigh heavily on the city’s internet freedom and could cripple its protest movement. , which made good use of the tools of an open internet.
“People in Hong Kong depend on companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft who decide how they want their relationship with China to be,” said Maciej Ceglowski, a prominent web developer and privacy activist. “We already saw this with Apple, with its blunt ban on the map.” The key question, he said, is what influence Hong Kong people have on tech giants, whom he called “state actors.”
While Hong Kong’s population of less than eight million represents a small market, Ceglowski said the city has a powerful weapon: its moral advantage. “You have this impeccable moral position after a year of these desperate protests,” he said. “There is a little fear among the administration of Apple, Google, Facebook that they cannot sell Hong Kong because they would have an internal revolt because of it. It is good leverage for a small city. ”
As things stir, protesters in Hong Kong are turning to secure messaging services like Telegram and Signal, as well as secure email providers like ProtonMail, neither of which have Hong Kong operations that could compromise their ability to protect user data. Yen, the CEO of ProtonMail, said the company had considered opening an office in Hong Kong last year, but chose Taiwan. “[W]We were concerned that something like this would happen, ”Yen said.
Telegram, founded by Russian-born businessman Pavel Durov, used to operate in mainland China, but when Beijing banned the courier service in 2015, the company decided there was no point in negotiating to be unlocked.
“It is quite obvious that the Chinese government’s desire for full control over its population is inconsistent with our values,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel in 2017.
