Well the same can be said about human rights, they only care about it when it affects their business model in a positive way. if it cost them money they are very willing to turn their backs on it.

privacy is not possible in a world where governments are free to suppress the speech and will of the people. any company claiming otherwise simply sees their bottom line as more important than people, whether they are employees or customers.

To me Apple is the worst here because Tim and team have no shame, they will strut upon their stage at their own conferences about how they stand for rights but when the show lights are off they act completely different.

Boycott Apple for sucking up to China. Google products are at least a year ahead now anyways and Google actually left China altogether at one point.

Yep, but they aren't saints: Project Dragonfly.

Which was only a project proposal that was cancelled after employees rebelled against it. Apple actually did it.

Apple banned an app - 13 times that gives you a notification whenever there is publicly available news about a [drone strike](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just-banned-...).

The chances that they keep up an app that people use to gain unwanted transparency into any state is exactly 0%

At a more basic level, apple doesnt see people as customers. They have already maxed out thier target market. Expansion now turns on access to new markets: the will of governments. Governments are now the customer. Any app that angers them is for the block.

Right, and in marketing-speak it's called positioning. Taking a privacy stance allowed Apple to differentiate against their competitors without actually innovating.

This is true. But increasing revenue is the only way a corporation can "care" about anything within the current framework.

The framework needs to change. It's possible for the value of a company to be judged on more than just revenues.

If I took a slightly less black and white stance, I would say that totally stand for privacy and human rights, in the United States.

Isn't is possible (yes) for people to care about principles in their homeland, where it matters to them more and impacts them more? I care a lot more about my hometown than BFE Chinese countryside, even though in principle I want them to have a living wage, decent time off, and good health care.

I am still angry at Apple, the NBA, Blizzard and the rest. I think this is a darker shade of grey, though.

Privacy is cheap to engineer because it involves not doing things or hiring more people. They won't allow actions, won't sync data, won't pursue advanced ML, etc etc. It's a clever way to say, "Keeping up with Chrome/Android is hard".

This is the worst take here. Whether Apple is sincere or not about privacy long term, they've created dedicated hardware IPs for doing ML on-phone to get around doing it in the cloud. This is not easier than just shipping all the data to AWS.

I can tell you from the inside that everything I've seen is genuine, even though it makes doing ML-based projects very difficult. That said, I'm very disappointed in this removal as to me it flies against the value.