The Verge's recent technology survey showed that at least its audience believes that Google and Amazon are better protectors of personal privacy than Apple, so their strong stance on encryption and privacy is not yet completely effective in differentiating them from competitors. Hopefully articles like this will enhance the perceived value of privacy, because we need both private and public entities to agree on privacy for it to be effective.
That is true, but in the US a big problem is that part of the government is breaking the law with its surveillance. In that situation technology can help quite a bit. The constitution states that the government needs a warrant to search ones private papers. Encryption works great against illegal government snooping. When the intelligence agencies and Congress starts talking about requiring back doors, like the Clipper Chip or the Apple request, society can hear about it and push to keep the back doors out. Worked with the Clipper Chip at least.
For now. I argue that there will be a technology corporation more powerful than the reach of any nation-state within 50 years.
I’m not wishing for any particular outcome, but considering past convergences and future potential, I’m simply saying it’s likely that some kind of smart contracts operating on distributed computing platforms will eventually become standard processes for law enforcement once computation is more ubiquitous.
Do you think Apple would refuse to swap out the public keys if ordered to by the government? Have you ever wondered why iMessage doesn't allow out-of-band key verification?
I still think there is a market driver (China TAM) that motivates the behavior as much as anything here. I guess we'll see if the slope is slippery or not.
* iMessage still uses end-to-end encryption for messages in China.
* iPhones sold in China still utilize Secure Enclave for privacy/encryption.
* Aggregate data still uses differential privacy in China.
The government made a request of them which did not compromise their user's security, and they obliged.
Compare that to when the US government requested backdoor access pass Secure Enclave and they absolutely denied that request.
I agree that it's unfortunate for Chinese users that their government is placing additional limits on the available software in that ecosystem (as well as other ecosystems, I'm sure). But so long as the government is not asking Apple to compromise its users privacy I don't see any strong relation to corroborate the idea: "privacy matters, unless it's in your fastest-growing market".