Author Topic: New Site Monitors Censorship on Apple's Chinese App Store  (Read 273 times)

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New Site Monitors Censorship on Apple's Chinese App Store
« on: February 02, 2019, 04:55:10 PM »

applecensorship.com is a website focused on exposing the extent of censorship allowed by Apple on their iOS App Store. This is done by monitoring which applications are being removed from the store and comparing the App Store search results between 150 countries.

Greatfire is an anonymous Chinese non-profit organization (NGO) with a declared mission of monitoring the way China's Internet censorship and of building dedicated tools to be used for circumventing censorship measures.

As the NGO tweeted today:



Although the iOS Signal application has a history of being removed from and added back to Apple's iOS App Store, the platform's censorship problem goes way beyond one single app.

According to a statement made by Apple's CEO Tim Cook back in August 2017, the company has removed an undisclosed number of VPN iOS apps from its store at the request of China's censorship machine:

Quote
We were required by the [Chinese] government to remove some of the VPN apps from the app store that don't meet these new regulations. ... We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever we do business. We strongly believe participating in markets and bringing benefits to customers is in the best interest of the folks there and in other countries as well. We believe in engaging with governments even when we disagree. This particular case, we're hopeful that over time the restrictions we're seeing are lessened, because innovation really requires freedom to collaborate and communicate.

In addition, as revealed by Apple's VP for Public Policy Cynthia C. Hogan in a statement issued at the request of U.S. senators Ted Cruz and Patrick Leahy in 2017, the apps were removed by Cupertino because it has to follow the laws of each country they are active in:

Quote
We are convinced that Apple can best promote fundamental rights, including the right of free expression, by being engaged even where we may disagree with a particular country's law. Chinese law requires that operators of virtual private network (VPN) apps comply with relevant regulations, including obtaining government licenses to do business, and earlier this year the Chinese government required Apple to remove a number of illegal VPN apps from the App Store.

The question is where does following the law ends and where collaborating with a censorship body begins. Especially considering that Apple has not only removed VPN apps at the request of the Chinese government but, according to a lot of user reports, it also took down iOS applications that can be used to access news, books, and movies from other countries.


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Although censorship's main goal is to block access to information that goes against the censor's belief that users should know, China's censorship targeting Apple's iOS platform has also caused other problems on iPhone and iPad devices.

This happened during July 2018 when Apple introduced a bug in iOS 11.4 which could cause an app to crash if a user typed the word "Taiwan" or received the Taiwan flag emoji and had their region set to China. Apple also completely dropped the Taiwanese flag emoji from the emoji list on devices set to the Chinese region.

Even though security researcher Patrick Wardle discovered that this issue should have affected only devices with the region set to China, users from the U.S. also reported app crashes because of this bug.



Apple never admitted of doing this at the request of China because of its refusal to acknowledge Taiwan as its own country, probably because that would have meant that Cupertino would put China's political interests above their own customers.

However, the company did fix the software bug in iOS 11.4.1, saying that "Processing an emoji under certain configurations may lead to a denial of service" and giving Wardle credit for discovering the issue.

At the moment, Apple finds itself between a rock and a hard place, and a solution to the Chinese App Store censorship issue is very hard to reach given the countries strict regulations regarding foreign companies.

However, Apple could at least add the app takedown requests to their yearly transparency report and, according to a report by The Intercept, this might happen sooner than later given that one of the company's spokespersons admitted that "Apple, in its next transparency report, is planning to release information on government requests to remove apps from its app store."

source