Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

Re:Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro... by patrec on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:01PM (#21209130)

Can you explain why you think that complying with hard legal requirements that are a hard pre-requisite to doing business in an authoritarian country is worse than eroding freedom of speech in a non-authoritarian country?

Apple can chose to operate in China and backdoor iCloud there or they can chose not to operate in China at all. It's hard for me to see how either choice will substantially affect people's liberties in China, it's not like apple products are in any way vital to the surveillance state.

On the other hand more and more companies retaliating (out of a desire to curry economic favor with China) against people who exercise their freedom of speech in non-authoritarian countries would seem to affect people's liberties to me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro... by kop316 on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:44PM (#21209422)

To me, this is why:

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

Tim Cook defied the US goverment over the exact same issue, and even said:

"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."

So to me, seeing him allow Chinese authorities access to that same data in China in the name of sales is incredibly hypocritical.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro... by heyoni on Thursday October 10, 2019 @12:06AM (#21210783)

This way he gets to sell iPhones in China and the Chinese should obviously avoid using iCloud. If Apple was hiding this fact then I would have a problem with it. And if the device encryption isn’t compromised, then local data is probably safer on an iPhone than a lot of other devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]