Apple’s ‘Golden Gate’ project delivers user data to the Chinese government
Apple has built a strong reputation on user privacy, but Joel Burgess wonders whether the company is having to backpedal on these ethics.
Apple has long touted the importance of privacy across its devices, going so far as to secure advertising billboards in Vegas’ most prominent positions ahead of the 2019 CES stating “What happens on your iPhone, Stays on your iPhone”. Since 2016, the tech company has also fought a number of high profile requests from the FBI to create a backdoor into its devices for the US government on the grounds that backdoors create privacy vulnerabilities that can be exploited by more than just law enforcement. Tim Cook even publicly rebuked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 for not prioritising its customers’ privacy by deleting extraneous user data… a comment that looks a little rich now that it’s emerged that Apple has spent the last few years being bullied into restructuring its Chinese operations to circumvent US laws prohibiting it from sharing user data with the Chinese government.
A recent article by the New York Times details the Cuppertino company’s long road to ceding control over user data in China, a process that began all the way back in 2016 following the announcement of a national data law that stated all “personal information and important data” produced in China was required to remain in China. This law came into effect in June 2017 and although Apple pushed back to keep the data in the US, the company’s local employees warned that the Chinese government would likely shut down iCloud if Apple did not move this data to local servers. Since the US has laws that prevent American companies from sharing data with the Chinese government, Apple arranged for all local data to be transitioned into the hands of Guizhou-cloud Big Data (GCBD), a company owned by the government of Guizhou province.
All iCloud data is encrypted and while the data might be held on government owned hardware, it still requires a key to access, something that Apple was able to hold onto for another eight months after the data centre transition. The New York Times was not able to discern why these keys were eventually passed over to the Chinese government in 2018, but Apple’s $55 billion dollar local annual revenue and largely China-based manufacturing operation put the company in a uniquely vulnerable position.
While this is a considerable backflip on the privacy stance it actively promotes in the rest of the world, critics argue that Apple’s relationship with the Chinese government makes it complicit in a much broader remit of local censorship behaviour as well. The Asia Director of Amnesty International, Nicholas Bequelin said to The Times, “Apple has become a cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet”.
Apple admitted it approved 1,217 demands by the local government to remove specific applications from the app store in the two years prior to June 2020, a figure roughly five times the number of apps removed at the request of every other nation’s government over that period. This figure is just a fraction of the 55,000 odd apps that The Times estimates have been removed from the App Store in China since 2017. 600 of these are supposedly news related, but Apple only acknowledges that 70 news apps were removed at the request of the government, a discrepancy that is explained by Apple’s internal app removal policy that, according to the former head of the App Store, Philip Shoemaker, required automatic removal of any apps the company believed to be ‘off-limits’ in China.
“Tim Cook even publicly rebuked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 for not prioritising its customers’ privacy by deleting extraneous user data… a comment that looks a little rich now that it’s emerged that Apple has spent the last few years being bullied into restructuring its Chinese operations to circumvent US laws prohibiting it from sharing user data with the Chinese government.”