“Apple’s response to US and UK government demands for backdoors to user data has been direct, bordering on defiant,” Joon Ian Wong reports for Quartz. “Apple appears to take a different tack in dealing with data security demands from China, a key growth market for the company.”
“In January 2015, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily claimed, in a tweet, that Apple had agreed to security checks by the Chinese government. This followed a piece in the Beijing News that claimed Apple acceded to audits after a meeting between Cook and China’s top internet official, Lu Wei,” Wong reports. “China’s State Internet Information Office would reportedly be allowed to perform “security checks” on all Apple products sold on the mainland. According to the report, this was despite Cook’s assurances that the devices didn’t contain backdoors accessible by any government, including the US.”
“If Apple had indeed agreed to a Beijing security audit, it could have shared vital information with the Chinese government, such as its operating system’s source code, that could indirectly help government agents discover vulnerabilities on their own. It would have been a serious departure from Apple’s public, privacy-centric stance,” Wong reports. “When contacted today, an Apple spokesperson pointed Quartz to the company’s privacy policy, which states that the company has never worked with any government to create a backdoor to its products. ‘We have also never allowed any government access to our servers. And we never will,’ the policy reads.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, but did Apple agreed to special security checks by Beijing or not? And, if so, what do they entail?
Apple’s privacy policy is here.
SEE ALSO:
Apple agrees to subject products to Chinese government security inspections – January 22, 2015
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]