Apple is playing by the rules, and this time decided that this is not the hill they want to die on. That's their prerogative. Don't like the rules? Then go complain to those that make the rules to begin with, not those that play by those rules.

It's nobody's job to do it.

They still potentially can fix the problem. Wouldn't it be great if they used their influence to help fix things?

I agree that there's a "choose your battles" aspect to this. Considering what Apple did with the San Bernandino case, this seems (ideologically) right, but the potential losses are pretty high.

What I read from that is that you do not think that it is a more appropriate role for, say, the U. S. government. If that is the case, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. My POV is that to a large extent the U.s government has that leeway because they don't have financial incentives/disincentives to steer their decisions (this falls apart when viewed in a larger economic sense, but bear with me). Instead, the government makes laws, decrees, and treaties that fit within a worldview of what benefits the country as a whole, and to some extent to cajole other countries who might have a different worldview (Iran or Russia, for example). Or put another way, we leave it to the government to represent our moral, ethical and economic views of how the world should work. Whereas Apple should represent a different view: the desires of those that own stock with the symbol "AAPL", and their desire to make money (where are the "fiduciary obligation" folks when you need them?) If AAPL happens to take a stand I agree with, hurray, I'll buy more of their products and probably more of their stock. If they mistreat workers, I'll dig in and find out if I still feel comfortable giving them my monetary support (personally, no worse than others, maybe a little better). But what I don't expect from AAPL is for them to instigate "regime change" or whatever else it is the NYT is expecting them to do.

Anyway, that turned out longer than I wanted, but that's where I'm coming from.

For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior. Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, and certainly it represents many ideals of democracy and liberty more than other contending powers. But consider the mess that was Iran-Contra affair or the various regimes ranging from unsavory authoritarianism to sheer terrorism (with "disappearances" and torture) CIA supported in Latin America in the name of anti-communism. (God forbid someone propose an idea of land reform in South America or advancing workers' and natives' rights against UFC, despite that's how numerous European countries avoided communism.) Did these actions (and various other questionable shenanigans the US government has been partial to) represent your ethical positions?

It's everyone's job to do it, and what any government does is only part of that. For example, you mentioned AAPL stock owners. According to any sane ethical system, the moral duty of any individual CEO or a member of board or stock owner as a human person with rights and corresponding duties to act ethically overrides their financial or legal duty to maximize corporate profits.

The US Government is supposed to represent the people, and thus must uphold that people's values. The US government is a moral agent.

A person is a moral agent.

Though many here are happy to concede the reality that Apple is comprised of individuals and that it exists as an organisation as a part of society, and just view it as a profit-maximising entity. This is perverse. A corporation is a moral agent, and when it's morality conflicts with it's profits, morality should win. We'd expect nothing less of literally everybody/everything else.

I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.

I am not so sure that's true. If every agent is acting morally, then does the sum of those actions constitute morality? I think so.

Apple has some agents who are not moral agents. I suspect that all corps are like this.

Apple certainly does have agents that are not moral agents (e.g., automatons like Siri), but for a different reason than you suggest.

i m saying that the top brass making decisions are not acting as moral agents, because they don't feel the responsibility of any of the choices insofar as it increases the profit of the company.

We need to stop looking to corporations as doing the jobs our government should be doing.

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

Chinese gov’t just recognized how much data has on its users.

Uh, did you miss the whole iPhone/FBI thing here. Not only did many of us in the US (and virtually all of us on HN) accept them telling us that our government was wrong and should change, we relished it! We were glad someone finally stood up to the US government and its surveillance overreach.

Could it be that many, perhaps most, Chinese would think the same way? I suspect so, given how many of them use VPNs there.

It's not hypocritical to say someone is wrong without mentioning all the other people are wrong. You can't list literally every bad thing that happens in every press release, and you can scope criticism.

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

[1] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/207...

[2] https://www.theinformation.com/Google-s-China-App-Store-Talk...

I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.

Do you mind point some examples?

Payments via AliPay and WePay were technically illegal before they were legalized post facto after they became popular. A western company could have never gone near that.

All the western companies pay income tax on private health insurance benefits, while all the Chinese companies don't, because the law is unclear.

Huh. Sounds like a certain transportation company...

I didn't bother talking about Didi because of Uber.

Are you saying that Baidu was directing traffic to health care scams willingly?

Interesting remark on AliPay & WePay. I wonder what kind of agreements Chinese gov made with those companies after the fact.

Here's as good as any point to remember that a warrant canary disappeared from Apple's privacy text about a year ago. Before it was about "we will protect user's privacy".. then there was a big "privacy" announcement that had text about following the law etc. IMHO gov got to them and it's understandable - companies exist in frameworks set by governments. It's in Apple's best interest to comply with them. To suggest otherwise is a political stance, not an economic one.

China doesn't have rule of law, so everything is illegal but nothing is, if you can navigate that contradiction, then you just have to make sure your context isn't bad enough to be cracked down on. The same was true with Didi and anti-black cab laws (but Uber operates in the gray margins of those laws all the time, so there was no point in mentioning that).

China doesn't really care about your idealism. If you go against the government's interests, they will beat you down. This is one thing the Chinese companies get really well and allow them to play fast and lose with the law as long as they adhere to that one principal.

it is also highly laughable for your private health insurance joke. there is _no_ Chinese law requiring any company to provide _private_ health insurance to anyone. Public healthcare levy is required by the law, that is all.

Something like that is nearly unthinkable in the US or Western Europe. It would be equivalent to Jeff Bezos spinning off AWS and giving himself 2/3 ownership of it, without approval from AMZN shareholders.

The heart of your argument is that a corporation is executing a transaction that could possible be illegal elsewhere: the US or Western Europe is better because this would not be possible here.

If that is your argument, I can think of two examples off the top of my head:

1. Goldman Sachs executive in 1MDB scandal 2. Banks offloading their mortgage-back securities positions by selling the directly opposite positions to their clients

Corporations executing shady transactions in the US or Western Europe is not as uncommon or "unthinkable" as you might imagine. Your argument stems from a enthocentric point of view and romanticizing one system over another by neglecting all the bad from one side.

I also fail to see how Chinese companies has anything related to my argument. Just because Chinese companies were involved doesn't weaken it.

You are seeing things through tinted shades before you even have the chance to analyze my argument. You are framing the argument as China vs US. I am pointing out the flaw in op's argument. See the difference ;). Your reply was rude.

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081214/5-thin...

You're absolutely right, and you should follow this to its logical conclusion. Apple only does what's in its best interests. The company consistently acts to strengthen its brand whenever possible to make more money.

It's irrational to expect a corporation, whether it's Apple or any other entity, to act ethically. Every decision they make, from sponsoring LGBT events to pushing back against the FBI, is made carefully with their brand in mind. Imagine what would happened, for instance, if Apple hadn't pushed back against the FBI. Their customers would have been enraged, just as they are now.

The real question is this: What would you expect Apple to do as a shareholder?

They absolutely would not have. HN-types might have, but many of them were also enraged about many of Apple's business practices over the years including their App Store policies, not being "open", etc. And it hasn't had any measurable impact on Apple's success as a business.

The public at large wouldn't have cared just like they don't care when Apple complies with lawful orders for information as they do now [1].

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

Perhaps not. But Apple absolutely benefited from the overwhelmingly positive press coverage it received as a result of their decision to oppose the FBI. And when the FBI withdrew their request, Apple looked like the winner. So yes, I do believe they opposed the FBI in that instance to strengthen their brand.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/politics/donald-trump-apple-bo...

Remember this document? Apple was the last company to be subverted either willingly nor not. I'll bet it pissed Cook the hell of that Apple was even on this list. I believe they completely revamped their cloud architecture after that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

People are always saying things like this, but we never really have any good data on what the alternative would have been. Just because you're in the black doesn't mean you haven't lost billions of dollars in additional profits.

Apple had the first mover advantage with the iPhone. There is a fair argument that they would still have the bulk of the market if they had been more open, instead of conceding the majority share to Android.

I'd guess they'd downgrade security on clearly-identifiable devices. And that's okay. We lost the moral high ground on mass surveillance many years ago.

This is historically terrible advice.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

Apple's leaders take strong stances in those American political positions because those stances are against the tribal outgroup of the people who control Apple.

The tribal outgroup is, of course, American conservatives - especially social conservatives and Christians.

Of course any reasonable person would acknowledge that China's government is far more guilty of all the same wrongs as American conservatives, and many more. However, China isn't the outgroup of the tribe that controls Apple. They are a "far group" - just some people on the other side of the world doing terrible things.

What's more, they're non-white, which in the far-left view means the real moral responsibility for their actions must be traced back to the decisions of a white man some time in the colonial past. Ultimately all wrongs point to the true tribal outgroup - white male Western conservatives.

So Apple's leaders don't really care emotionally about anything China's government is doing. Because the tribal lines don't point to caring.

]Fighting against American conservatives is really rewarding, in self-image and social standing, and it doesn't cost or risk much business-wise, and it feels good to make them suffer because activists don't like them anyway. Fighting against China isn't rewarding at all, and costs a lot more, and people are trained to see them as hypo-agentic victims since they're non-white in the first place. That's the difference.

That business and human rights are perpendicular issues. Actually it all started from the idea that free market causes a freer society. I think it is now clear that this causality is not true, but now proponents of unregulated free markets changed their stance to "Meh, that's the way we have done for decades, let's just keep that way."

My stance is that a global free-market is a good objective and should be encouraged, that borders should gradually disappear. However, encouraging goods and capital flow through otherwise tight borders is not helping reach that goal.

My theory is that 4 important things cross borders: goods, money, people and information. All 4 must have the same level of freedom. Imbalances should be addressed. For instance, China does not easily let people and information flow in and out of its territory, yet it lets funds flow and even subsidizes goods going out of it (Which is why Shenzhen to LA shipping can be cheaper than SF to LA). We should link these issues together. Either by funding and helping people and information cross these borders or, if impossible, by taxing goods and funds.

Actually a country that prevents people going out of it but let money go in and goods go out is the opposite of what the theory of democratic capitalism is about. It is a setup that allows outsourcing slavery. Free market in that case is not a perpendicular issue to this, but the very cause of the problem.

Thankfully, people around the world are waking up to the horror of neoliberalism like yours and rebelling against it.