Thread by @tolmasky

We’re past the point where giving Apple the benefit of the doubt can be interpreted as anything other than willful ignorance from a place of Western privilege. These aren’t hypotheticals, we already have examples of Apple's policies failing people in other countries. 1/🧵

Case in point, while we argue whether sideloading would ruin our "experience" on the iPhone, the bottleneck of the @AppStore was already wielded against Hong Kong protestors when China forced Apple to remove HKmap.live, an app they used to avoid police violence. 2/🧵

If your takeaway is that this is merely a "troubling situation" in the "complicated relationship with China," then you aren't only demonstrating how you feel about people in other countries, but also living under a comfortable delusion that this couldn’t happen here too. 3/🧵

Similarly, if you staunchly defend the @AppStore's laughable and disingenuous "security model" while finding the stinginess of Apple's Bug Bounty program a boring financial topic, it just shows that you're lucky enough to not actually be under a true security threat. 4/🧵

China's surveillance of Uyghur Muslims and the recent NSO spyware targeting journalists leave no doubt that iOS is under real threat. The fact that the targeting of a religious community didn't result in Apple pursuing the most ambitious Bug Bounty Program is shameful. 5/🧵

And finally, Apple's acquiesance to host Chinese iCloud accounts on Chinese servers should have made them want to steer completely clear from building the necessary infrastructure to employ mass surveilance at the click of a button. 6/🧵

Apple's conceptual explanations around this system being tied to iCloud thus give me zero assurance that these tools won't be used against people in countries like China, given Apple's existing, demonstrated, and repeated history there. 7/🧵

This is what I mean by Western privelege: whether it's weighing app censorship vs. UX, or arguing that Apple "has a lot to lose" if they bungle this scanning thing here, it ignores that there are people elsewhere that don't have the luxury of these "protective incentives". 8/🧵

The fundamental issue is that Apple has not grown up. They have either not realized, or simply choose to refuse the responsibility of, their position. They aren't "like a game console." They are one of the primary platforms that people *trust their lives to*. 9/🧵

For many people the iPhone *is* their computer. In the last year we've even entrusted the tracing of a pandemic to it. Leadership that understood the magnitude of this position would be proud of this accomplishment, but also humbled by the responsibility it brings with it. 10/🧵

Part of that responsibility means foregoing features that, in the wrong hands, could be used to cause harm. Apple isn't an immutable entity. Even if you trust today's Apple completely, we don't know who could be in control tomorrow, or what their values could be. 11/🧵