I-Phone freaks. Are you proud of how Apple bowed to Chinese govt demands?

via Gizmodo.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has explained why his company decided to succumb to China’s pressure and remove an app that was being used by Honk Kong pro-democracy protestors.

Protesters had been using the HKmap.live app to monitor police movement based on crowdsourced inputs. Apple removed the app a few days ago, then reinstated it, then pulled it again on Wednesday, a day after People’s Daily, China’s state-run news platform published a piece that proposed Apple was complicit in “illegal acts” by helping the protestors “engage in more violence.”

Reuters reports that Cook defended the decision in a statement posted on an internal company site. “It is no secret that technology can be used for good or for ill. This case is no different,” Cook wrote, according to Reuters, which reviewed the letter.

Later in the same article....

 The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag.

As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this.

Moreover, what are these incidents where protesters have targeted individual police for a premeditated attack? Can Mr. Cook point to a single example? Can anyone?

Story here. 

First.

Apple is China's bitch.  Full stop.  It can't be denied.  Additionally if you're using an Apple product then you're complicit in helping them be China's bitch.

Second.

Remember the part of our exporting our manufacturing to China that was suppose to lead to China being more open?  More democratic?  To provide new markets for American business?

That's failed.  Spectacularly failed. 

We didn't transform China.  China transformed us.