This rationale focuses on how the app has been used, rather than what it does, which could apply equally well to any text messaging or web browser app that is used illegally.

Imagine if this said:

> We have learned that an app, iMessage, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations that people send via text message and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.

This kind of reasoning is applied everywhere, all the time. It seems the majority opinion is that the "bannable" property of a tool depends on the ratio of good vs. evil usage of the tool, with time weakening the effect of evil.

So a tool that's mostly used for evil shortly after it's created is worthy of a ban (e. g. 8chan [1], Gab). But a tool which started with a more favorable ratio and slowly drifted into mostly evil-use territory (e.g. Tor, prepaid phones) isn't seen as being inherently evil and thus gets a pass. Tools that are overwhelmingly used for good will even have negative bannability (they will be actively protected and a ban will be seen as an offense) regardless of them being sometimes used for particularly evil purposes (e.g. Google, Twitter, cash).

In the present case, HKmap.live is mostly used by protesters (good usage as seen from an HN crowd PoV), so Apple's decision is seen as unjust here. But had it been mostly used by criminals early on, the consensus opinion would certainly be different.

There's a lesson for app builders: if your tool is vulnerable to bans by centralized/mob entities, it's especially important to attract enough good usage (as judged by the enforcer) early on in the history of your service.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055

Exactly, by that account, they should remove encryption on iMessage so that police can access it.

I'm actually quite surprised that iMessage has seemingly flown under the radar in authoritarian countries for this long…maybe nobody uses it there?

People only use it because it's enabled by default and takes over from SMS with minimal intervention. There's no point using it when there's also WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc. The competition are largely cross-platform. I'm surprised Apple even bothered to make it in the first place. They could have saved themselves the effort and not got into that market, rather than making an app that makes them look bad.

How does it make them look bad? In any case when it was developed WhatsApp was still early days (and supposed to eventually charge fees), and neither Messenger nor the others existed. It succeeded well enough that in very iPhone-heavy markets WhatsApp never really became a thing.

iMessage is successful as in it makes Android users look bad. It extends and overtakes the SMS standard in such a way that anyone not in the circle appears to be disfunctional. A lock-in situation passing as the new normal for uninformed Apple users.

Green Bubbles: How Apple Quietly Gets iPhone Users To Hate Android Users https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150211/05455029985/green...

I think a better distinction is between what an app allows and what it facilitates.

Could you give an example of when the distinction matters?

Importantly, it also applies to anonymous AirDrop, which is heavily used by Hong Kong protesters. Will Apple disable that too?

As someone who has lived under a dictatorship this messaging has a familiar feel. As the now late dictator was clamping (beating and killing) down on opposition parties the press statements would always say something along the lines of, "we are protecting the rights of law abiding citizens". He never ever said I do not like anyone disagreeing with me.

> we are protecting the rights of law abiding citizens

I find it very interesting when people say they only protect the rights of "law abiding citizens", since this is usually just a veiled excuse for "we don't think people who break the law should have rights, actually, you shouldn't have rights because you might break the law too".

I fully agree with you, that is actually the trick being pulled. The words used make it harder for people on the outside to decide who is actually the villain and who the good guys are.

What dictator is this by the way? Just curious.

This sounds like a template blurb, not an actual stance. I wonder why Apple didn't remove WhatsApp from the App Store in India, since it was the platform used to lynch several people in the last few years. Local law in India prohibits people killing people.

This is a slippery slope, and Apple fell right into it quickly instead of being cautious and fighting for what's right!

That is some incredible spin.

I'm as sympathetic to the protests as anyone and I'm definitely not used to defending Apple's behavior, but are we sure that this is spin? Undoubtedly the app is being used for more than just "ambushing and attacking police". But absent a firm belief that this reason from the Chinese government is bullshit, it's actually a pretty tall order (and questionably ethical) for a corporation to push back against a govt demand to remove a tool ostensibly being used to attack police forces.

My views on computing freedom generally skew towards the Stallman side of the spectrum, so I'd actually be fine with a stronger norm that Apple could tell govts to screw off[1]. But I'm very aware that I'm an outlier in this sense, and expecting Apple to push back in the face of a demand like this seems well beyond consistency with the norms that currently exist around tech companies' responsiveness expect to govt demands, on grounds of what the power relationship should be between governmental and corporate entities.

[1] (and ideally stop being so heavy-handed about their own enforcement of App Store apps...but that's another story)

The point is the app is not being used for ambushing and attacking police at all, because there have been no such ambushes in Hong Kong.

The few situations where Hong Kong police have been in danger have come when a small group splits off and is isolated during a protest. In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.

By its nature, the app shows large concentrations of police forces. The argument is ridiculous on its face, even if you don't know the situation on the ground in Hong Kong well.

No one has been able to point to a single Hong Kong law this app violates, or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.

> The point is the app is not being used for ambushing and attacking police at all, because there have been no such ambushes in Hong Kong.

> In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.

Right, this is what my questions were conditioned on. It's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on in situations like this when the government is so famously fond of misinformation and control of the press, but there's at least claims out there [1] that this has happened, along with plenty more examples of more general violence from sources that are not credibly controlled by China.

I don't pretend to know that this claim is true, but it's surprising to me that you are so confident that no such incidents have happened, even in the face of (even possibly false) news reports that it has happened.

More importantly, you're free to make whatever wild guesses that the official story is a lie in a way that Apple perhaps isn't: if the reports of ambushes are even somewhat credible, it's not clear to me how they could push back against a gov't claiming that an app is facilitating attacks on police.

Note that I'm not saying that their hands are definitely tied here, my model of this isn't high-confidence and I'd personally be opposed to the takedown of a communications app in most situations (including this one). I'm just trying to reconcile the reactions here to the norms we currently have around corporations' power relative to gov't.

> or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.

This is fair; I am filling in the blanks with assumptions a little here: namely, that Apple's statement reflects the pretext of the govt's demand for removal. I also figure that isolated incidents of violence are far from difficult to come by in riots as intense as the ones in question (the Wikipedia page for the protests has a handful of examples). But it seems to me that this context in, say, the US, would be such that Apple would be criticized for refusal to remove the app, with plenty of takes about how irresponsible the decision is (it certainly stands on firmer ground than the new consensus that eg platforms are responsible for cracking down on "hate speech"). The difference here seems to be the legitimacy people grant to the gov't being resisted, and it's again not clear to me that that's a call that a company like Apple could or should be making (beyond broad decisions like whether or not to operate in the country).

Thanks for the thoughtful response by the way: my comment doesn't have a strong position but is exploring some nuance I have questions about, and I know HN isn't really the forum for posting anything but the kinds of neatly-wrapped takes that can be swallowed (or rejected) whole by simpletons. It's always nice to get some engagement with the content of the comment instead of the usual mindless pattern-matching + upvote/downvote that most here are limited to.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...

The protestors always try to find away to ambushes the police. There is a case that the protesters try to burn a police alive. The protester definitely monitoring the police movement to vandalize the train stations and the shops

> The protestors always try to find away to ambushes the police.

So then why ban the app?

To prevent the protestor to use the app for guerilla tactic. The protestor are known to ambush police if their number is small. And to play cat and mouse with the police to vandalize

This [1] is the video of the first shooting in the Hong Kong protests - reasonably safe for life for anybody who has not seen it. Something I didn't understand when I first saw the video is how the protesters were able to do what they do. An armed group of protesters moved rapidly towards their target, and manage to ambush him around a blind corner. Their target was a single police officer that seems to have temporarily become separated from other officers. The protesters seemed to know this and all immediately set upon him.

You could make an argument that somehow they used some other technology to carry out their attack, but I'm not sure how much weight it'd have beyond the fact that no we don't have video (to my knowledge) of one of those guys explicitly opening and looking at the app to find the target. In any case, it certainly refutes the argument that no protesters have managed to catch the police by surprise or ambush them - because that is exactly what happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

Just look at the app. It doesn't have the spatial resolution to do this, nor does it identify individual officers, and it's got a considerable lag in real time.

Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.

Or come and see for yourself.

Or rely on the eyewitness testimony of hundreds of journalists in Hong Kong who have seen this same situation play out—cops run out too far, get isolated, get scared, draw a sidearm.

Or figure it out from first principles on a message board.

> Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.

Are you saying this video is taken out of context? Please do share any available video evidence. I assure you I tried quite hard to try to find more and this all I came up with! This is the thing that most confuses me about these protests. They are, by far, the most widely recorded protests in a developed nation - yet lengthy in context footage of the critical events events is surprisingly difficult to come by. Instead we just get snippets taken out of context that can be framed to show anything you want to show.

For instance this [1] is Reuters reporting of this video entitled "Dramatic footage captures moment when Hong Kong protester was shot." It strips out absolutely all context and splices the video together in a way that even makes it seem like it's an officer charging a protester who is simply trying to defend himself from an officer drawing a gun. It then includes clips from a police statement which, without the context of what that conflict was about, paired with the selected footage they provided sounds comically absurd.

This is absolutely propaganda, and quite ham handed propaganda at that. But of course there is also extensive propaganda coming from the Chinese side as well. It makes it all extremely difficult to have any clue of what is really happening. If you have any recommendations whatsoever on lengthy uninterrupted film footage on these events, I am absolutely all ears.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-anniversary-hongkon...

There are a number of people livestreaming all the protests, including setups where you can watch multiple streams on a page. One of the streamers is a hero who rolls up to protests in a wheelchair.

There's also lots and lots of long-form protest footage available, but you need a Chinese speaker to help you Google your way to it.

Can you post some examples or are you keeping them secret on purpose?

I don't want to post my own raw video because I don't want to get anyone in trouble. Illegal assembly carries a potential 5 year sentence.

I don't speak Chinese or have links handy but it is not hard to find with some help from a native speaker. Dig around LiHKG.

They might as well remove the web browser and any other form of communication capable apps then since they might be used for the same purposes.

Apple has shown incredible little spine in relation to china, probably because they are 100% dependent on them to make their phones.

Most likely a copy paste from what the CCP told them.

Will Apple also be taking down Waze and Facebook?

These are pure lies, top to bottom.

And how exactly would you know that? There is a great deal of animosity towards police right now in HK. A very small minority of protestors have demonstrated willingness to apply violence, and police (including off-duty officers) have been attacked in the open on more than one occasion. So I don’t think it’s inconceivable that the availability of a crowdsourced map might increase such incidents.

Of course, this is going to end up being a pretext to ban the website too, which is going to introduce China-style internet censorship to HK. Nobody wants that. The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.

One of the problems being faced in HK is that there are times when it's difficult to identify when the police are HK police, or when the police are actually Chinese military in HK uniform.

One of the signs (as it always is) is the footwear used by the officers differs between actual HK police and Chinese military forces in HK police uniform.

Another problem is that there are times when it's difficult to identify when the protestors are HK citizens, or when the protestors are Chinese military in plain clothes.

There was an incident a few weeks back where a fire was set outside Central MTR station which was reported to have been set by HK protestors. There was graffiti on the wall to this effect. The graffiti was written in simplified Chinese, which is used in the mainland. In Hong Kong, they use traditional Chinese in written communications.

The difficulty is in accurate attribution. Terrorist groups will take credit for atrocities they didn't commit because it's beneficial for them and their cause. Which then leads down the rabbit hole of asking who benefits from violence in HK? It's also worth looking at the history of protests in HK, how frequently they have occurred, and how often violence has actually erupted.

It's a country that successfully peacefully protested numerous times, to great effect.

> The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.

Fortunately, the people in HK don't share this view, and continue to protest for their rights and their freedoms. They're not giving up, they're not giving in. It's easy to be this pessimistic when you live in a western country, where peaceful protests in recent history (~20 years or so) are almost completely ineffective. When you've lived in a place where peaceful protests have historically been effective, it's a different story. Especially when it's literally your own life on the line.

There is zero evidence of covert mainland Chinese participation in the protests on either side, although as you demonstrate the rumors about it are nonstop.

lol. HK police and protests are staying at home watching tvs, there are just mainlanders on street both damaging properties and arresting themselves.

I know that because I've been attending Hong Kong protests for two months and talking to people.

Off-duty police are not even tracked on the map, so I don't get your argument even if I accepted the false premise that attacks on police are common.

I did not say that attacks on police were common. Indeed, I believe that any such attacks should be the work of a very small minority of protestors who would definitely not represent the whole.

It’s clear that attacks against off-duty police officers have happened in the past, so I included that aside as an example of the threats that police face. Of course those attacks predate the map app. Those are also the kinds of attacks that tend to make news, because they’re essentially attacks against civilians (similarly, this is why news of police attacks against civilians make news).

Then by the same logic, WeChat should be banned since it's clearly documented to be used by Chinese Trolls to attack protesters in Australia and Canada.

If WeChat’s primary purpose was to track protestors overseas, then yeah, it should be banned. But that’s not what the app does.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to side with anyone here - I’m just calling out a knee-jerk response that I don’t believe is actually based in fact. If there’s good evidence that Apple or the HK government is inventing evidence of misuse, I’ll happily take back what I’ve said.

My east european country has been governed by authoritarian rule which was 95% dependent on a totalitarian foreign nation state. You either don't understand what this means or are actively protecting a totalitarian dictatorship.

Isn't Waze also displaying police forces ? Also by croudsourcing information ? Why is Apple not looking into that ?

> A very small minority of protestors have demonstrated willingness to apply violence, and police (including off-duty officers) have been attacked in the open on more than one occasion

Haven't the police being doing the very same thing to protestors and innocent civilians?