Apple Censors Mobile App Content in China, Even if Users Seek Privacy

How committed is Apple (APPL) to user privacy and freedom? Not very, it seems—at least for users in China, where the company has blocked access to its News app for iOS mobile devices.

As its name implies, News is an app for aggregating and reading news on iPads and iPhones (presumably for people who haven't yet discovered Google News or other free, web-based news aggregators). The app is only available to install for Apple users in the United States. (Apple is currently testing the product in the United Kingdom and Australian markets.) Once it's installed, however, it can be used from any location.

Any location, that is, except mainland China, where News has stopped working. It just displays an error message informing users that the app "isn't supported in your current region."

Apple has not commented publicly on the issue, so it's hard to know exactly why News doesn't work in China. But it seems a pretty safe bet that the company is bowing to pressure from censorship-loving Chinese authorities who want to block Internet content for whatever reason. That makes sense given China's long history of Internet censorship, and the fact that News apparently works fine in every other part of the world—making it difficult to write this off as a technical issue.

But the fact that Apple is seemingly willing to cooperate with censorship in China is not what makes the News news really troubling. The biggest issue is that the company apparently "uses the location of the user to change the behavior of their device without their permission, even if the location service is disabled in the privacy settings," as Larry Salibra writes. That means Apple is ignoring privacy settings that allow users to opt out of a feature that would otherwise hide their location from people who want to track them.

Apple, Privacy and History

This issue is exactly why proprietary software that no one but developers can inspect is such a bad thing. Apple—which has made itself the most valuable software company in history by locking down its code more strictly than anyone else—can promise users privacy, but blatantly disregard their choices with impunity.

If there were ever a reason for more open source phones—and I mean truly open source ones like those running Ubuntu, not Android, whose open core is wrapped in proprietary chains in most cases—this is it.

OK. Maybe I'm feeling particularly anti-Apple at the moment because the latest movie about Steve Job has elicited all manner of apologetic paeans to the late Apple CEO, whom writer Aaron Sorkin has dared to portray as a conniving human being with deep faults, rather than as the father of all things good in the modern world.

Of course, we can't hold Jobs responsible for what Apple does with user privacy in 2015. But it's not as if the company under Jobs's leadership respected users—or, for that matter, developers—in any kind of meaningful way. It sold them overpriced computers, composed of parts made by exploited workers in China, that ran software Jobs had appropriated from open source projects, then encumbered with highly restrictive and nonsensical licenses. At least Bill Gates had the dignity to build Microsoft's lackluster operating systems around software he paid for.

Or, to put it as Richard Stallman did, Jobs's chief legacy for the personal computing world was "to make general-purpose computers with digital handcuffs more controlling and unjust than ever before. He designed them to refuse even to let users install their own choice of applications."

Now, spying on users to cooperate with government censors has added a new dimension to Apple's lust for control.

Jobs and Apple may not have been the worst things ever to happen to personal computing. But are they worthy of all the accolades the tech press loves to give them? Certainly not.