“Apple Inc. said it will turn over its cloud operations in China to a state-owned local partner [on] Feb. 28, complying with Chinese law mandating that customer data collected on the mainland be stored here,” Yoko Kubota reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“With the handover, photos, documents and messages uploaded by Apple users throughout China will be stored at a data center in the southwest province of Guizhou operated by the local partner, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co., Ltd,” Kubota reports. “Apple said that over the next seven weeks it will seek to make sure customers know about the coming changes, adding that the company “has strong data-privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems.””
“Last year, following Beijing’s requests, Apple shut down hundreds of virtual private network apps, or VPNs, that allow users to access blocked websites,” Kubota reports. “Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook defended that action at a business forum last month in Guangzhou, saying Apple needs to abide by Chinese laws so it can participate in the market and not be a bystander.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Cook, the newly-minted winner of the Newseum’s 2017 Free ExpressionAward, is trying to walk a line so fine in China that it doesn’t exist. It’s an impossible act to pull off.
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]