Something about this article feels "off", as if it were a fabricated and unsubstantiated story meant purely to sow uncertainty over the integrity of Apple's security in China. It felt off enough that I bothered to look into who this "sixth tone" publication is and create a throw-away -- according to foreignpolicy.com[1], it's affiliated with and at least partially funded by the state-owned Shanghai United Media Group.

[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-to...

So what's your takeaway? I would assume that the last thing the state would want to do is sow uncertainty about Apple's security in China. This would lead me to the conclusion that the story is real.

However, I can imagine another scenario. Assume that Apple's storage in China is still entirely safe from the state, but that Apple's main competitors are totally in bed with the state. In that case, the state could want to get people off of Apple, even as Apple moves the data into China.

The latter would be my takeaway as well, based on how effectively Google's search technology was extricated from China -- to Baidu's and the surveillance state's benefit, despite the results from Baidu being about as effective at finding useful information as AltaVista was at the end of it's reign.

One area to explore is the editor listed as David Paulk. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpaulk/ https://twitter.com/davidpaulk

At first glance his twitter feed looks pretty normal for a journalist from US living in China.

>it's affiliated with and at least partially funded by the state-owned Shanghai United Media Group.

what's the motivation for the chinese government here? if anything it makes china look bad because the sequence of events are:

1. force foreign company to relocate data there

2. apple moves user data there to comply

3. surprise! china facility gets hacked

4. Chinese populous resigns themselves to the eluded-to fact that Apple's devices will not offer privacy from the state even though it's only iCloud that we presume to be affected; consumer buys domestic device that is easier to spy on

5. Surveillance state mission accomplished!

I don't know, I suppose when you insert a state actor, it's the conspiracy equivalent of Godwin's Law.

(Assuming this is a true story) this is very unsettling and makes me anxious, not only for the Chinese people but also for companies that do business there.

"I’m really curious why you don’t want to use Guizhou-Cloud Big Data’s service," the technical advisor asked Qin during their recorded conversation.

This quote in particular made me cringe. If you haven't read the article, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data is a state-owned service where Chinese customers' iCloud data is now stored. The terminated Apple employee was implying that that Qin had something to hide, and regardless of whether that is true, Qin will surely end up on a government watch list after this ordeal.

Chinese HNers - what is the attitude over there in light of this and recent actions taken by Xi Jinping and the communist party?

Chinese government must be just delighted with all of the data that they soon will have access too from the US instance of iCloud coming to China. There is so much information that people don't know that gets synced to iCloud. I am constantly finding stuff that automatically get turn on after every OS update from Apple.

Only the Chinese users data is transferring to Chinese servers, not all of iCloud.

You must be very slow at finding this stuff then, seeing as there typically is more then one month between updates.

I don't understand this -- this "article" doesn't actually say that the Apple employee had access to the customer's private data, only that the employee made threats.

If the threats were credible that would be a big deal.

From the original post at Weibo (link in this article) in Chinese, the affected user also claims the Apple customer support logged in his iCloud account, since he receiving a login notification from Apple.