I have lived to the day that we give an example on china not doing something stupid a western democracy does about rights and freedom. Wild times to be alive. I am also surprised that they demand worldwide access and not just UK users data or all the data stored in UK jurisdiction. But this is going too far.
China has forced Apple to outsource iCloud in China to a state run company, so all data is just directly controlled by the government there. It’s an even worse situation.
That is just China's general rules around tech. Awful? Yes. But not a global issue. Most non-chinese companies are forced to have their chinese properties ran by a chinese company.
This is shown by companies like VW having cars made in china with effectively a license model, these cars are designed and built by a third party with a few interesting exceptions (VW actually licensed a design, the Taos, back and shipped it worldwide)
The insane overreach was the UK wanting data on people not in the UK
We literally tried to do this with TikTok. We can't exactly stand on a high-horse when the highest level of government in the US was totally fine with it.
Our noble "we can't have American data in the hands of our enemies," their savage "forcing American companies to turn over user data."
Edit: I misread the comment tree, I thought this comment was equating the TikTok situation to the UK's request.
I agree that the TikTok demands are pretty similar, though I might quibble over whether they're literally the same, since arrangements like that are the status quo in China but not in the US
Original comment below:
How is "remove foreign control of data on our nation's users" remotely the same as "give us access to foreign users' data"?
They're not even figuratively the same, despite you literally misusing that word
It's not clear which scenario you are referring to.
If by "give us access to foreign users' data", you mean TikTok, then ByteDance is only required to sell the US portion of TikTok to American buyers. If you mean iCloud, then Apple is only required to keep Chinese users' data on local servers.
Oh my bad, I misread the comment tree and thought this comment was a response to the grandparent.
"give us access to foreign users' data" referred to what the UK is asking for, I thought the post i was replying to was equating the UK's request to the US'
It is worse than that, I never expected that most democracies would go back to foregone days, because people get sold out on populism and decided to ignore history lessons.
As a child of Portuguese revolution, I am aware of plenty of stories, apparently many folks nowadays think those are stories to scare misbehaved kids.
Those who are charged with stopping cyber crime are very must against this. End to End encryption is one of the better protections they can give you against foreign hackers and they want you to use it.
Meanwhile down the hall are people who are charged with investigating crimes someone in the country commits and they are want this. It is a lot easier to prove someone is involved in some crime if a warrant can get their data, but end to end encryption means they can only get random bytes. (of course they don't want warrants either, but that is a different issue not relevant here so they will specify warrants in this debate)
The difference is that China and Russia have the sense to spy on foreign citizens with hackers, trackers, and other covert means. Somehow the UK feels entitled to Apple doing their espionage for them, and has the gall to ask publicly.
Note that this is not China apologia: they do the same brazen shit locally, but they're an authoritarian regime. I have lower expectations for human rights there.
