But those alleged crimes could not have possibly helped by the app, as has been pointed out: you don't get to see individual officers' locations and it does not show areas with no police at all either, just police hotspots (and technically, most areas even in a dense city like Hong Kong are without immediate police presence most of the time, anyway).

But even if we played devil's advocate and took the allegations of criminal activity that abused the app at face value, and assumed Tim Cook is not free to share specifics as the information might be confidential, he could at least answer what local laws were allegedly violated by the app itself. Those laws certainly are not confidential information.

Comparing it to Facebook or Snapchat makes absolutely no sense.

Considering the brutality of the HK police force in recent months, I would argue that this app is great at providing the public with information on how to avoid being tear gassed, beaten or arrested by avoiding the police. A lot of locals have been extremely pissed off with the police force. They have gone into very residential areas and fired tear gas unnecessarily among a whole host of other things.

Since when is that a crime?

When news reporters cover a protest in US and show live where the police is, are they committing a crime?

Incidentally if he posted about a riot in our city (thankfully pretty much unheard of) he'd be carrying out exactly the same function as this app!

Following US procedures in HK does not make sense. Companies always obey local laws but not laws in another country.

After that, the next question is if Apple, which even kinda positions itself as the new "Don't be evil" company including fighting some governments e.g. when they get told to subvert their own security tech, should side with such draconian laws or with the app makers.

The vast majority of people do not post or read those messages to coordinate violence against the police, but merely to stay out of the way when police and black block protestors or football hooligans clash.

I live near a football stadium, and there are some violent clashes of drunk hooligans and police after many games, but thankfully usually only on a small scale involving maybe 10-30 people against the police. Nonetheless, I made it a habit to avoid certain area for a couple of hours after a home game.

Perhaps avoiding police is the primary use case of the app.

..the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources.

And beyond the actions of the Chinese government, corporations like Apple have no integrity upon which to base trust for them anymore. They need to cough up real proof instead some canned response that basically tells us to trust them on blind faith alone.

And how is this different than the current American administration?

The US is currently a clusterfuck, yes. But if they were anything like China, the media would be in a blackout, thousands of political enemies would be sent to gulags and people across the board would be losing their jobs for speaking out.

To pretend that the US is in any way comparable is such an absurd distortion of reality, and really plays into China's narrative. Why criticize China if the US is just as bad ?

That would make it obvious that Apple is complying with law, and that they haven't "bowed to pressure" from either side.

If there is a claim that the app is violating law, then that should be validated by a judicial process, not by the operating nuances of a company.

If Apple are receiving reports from users that the law is being broken, they should be passing those on to law enforcement, and publicly complying with the response, not acting as their own arbitrator.

But it seems very plausible to me that Apple was presented with credible information that this app was being used to organize violent attacks and that Apple made a reasonable choice to ban the app according to Apple's policies about following local laws as well as Apple's internal policies about apps causing harm. I think that can be the case regardless of anyone at Apple's views about the merits of the Hong Kong protests as a whole.

If they always wait for a court order, PR disasters happen, and polticians dredge up 'think of the children' arguments.

If they don't wait for an order they can become part of the machinery of ill-intentioned polticial or commercial forces.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

However, I still think waiting for an order, especially in tense environments, is the right moral choice. I concede it probably isn't the right economic choice a lot of the time.

Government, law enforcement and court are not separated in China, they all belonging to the same central government. So if you really want a court order, they’ll issue one quickly.

That’s the tricky situation. Companies must obey local laws, but local laws are built on behalf of central government, and court exists for protecting central government.

If the order came from the HK gov, citizens know who is responsible for it and can act accordingly. And I'd expect this to be the reason Apple received pressure to remove it "by themselves".

And what of Twitter and Telegram and Messenger and Gmail and Weechat and Outlook?

This is also the same organization whose spokesperson that called a protestor being brutalized by officers a "yellow object" and who have been routinely documented fabricating evidence. Taking their word at face value is patently absurd.

Tim's statement doesn't add up.

Let's not give them a pass here, as it's quite obvious why they're accepting the Chinese statements at face value, because of how dependent they are on the Chinese market.

This is about money, not principles.

Let's not forget that in the United States, Apple has recourse to push back against government requests within the system of the law.

Yes, it's a reasonable demand. If public opinion is asking something of Apple, and its CEO chooses to answer, every aspect of the answer is open to scrutiny. Gruber indeed lists the specific evidence he would expect:

> - When was HKmap.live “used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”?

> - When was it used to “victimize individuals and property where no police are present”?

> - What local laws in Hong Kong does it violate?

It's unlikely that a CEO would be so thorough. Apple is particularly obsessed with secrecy, and tech companies in general seem to not want to disclose details when they restrict access to a product or platform.

But it's still a reasonable demand from an individual standpoint.

As for Hong Kong law, I can agree that it might be nice to cite a specific law, but I also don't find it at all difficult to believe that any government would have a law that allows the government to prohibit a communication medium that is being used to organize anti-government protests that have been sometimes violent.

For example, it could have been used to identify locations where police is about to withdraw to target last remaining officers. Or to identify a good place for an ambush with good escape options and no video surveillance and then lure police into the ambush by reporting a minor accident. Information about location and movements of the adversary is invaluable for exactly this reason - it gives the other side advantage in planning.

If something like this really did happen and if Apple has any specifics, it should totally release it down to exact location and time of incidents and the aftermath. These are very serious allegations that need substantial proofs.

The complaint is that Cook's claims are extraordinary and seemingly impossible on their face because of the fundamental nature of the app in question. Its purpose is to show the aggregated position of large concentrations of police, so as to let users avoid confrontations with them. How can such an app be used to "target individual officers for violence", since it provides no information about individual officers?

When so extraordinary a claim is made, hearsay evidence isn't the issue. What is necessary is an explanation of how the seemingly impossible is possible. Cook does not provide this or even address the apparent problem. A neutral person, reading Cook's memo without the proper background, might be mislead into believing the app in question does provide tracking of individual police officers. I don't accept this is an accident on Cook's part. I think he is deliberately attempting to mislead his own employees regarding the nature of the app, and as a consequence his decision to ban it.

Cook's cited but unenumerated "credible" information received from a government body and users only compounds the situation. Cook could provide plenty of additional material to support his claim. He could provide more detailed information on exactly what information was received, in what volume, and in what form. He could explain the efforts the company undertook to perform independent corroboration of the evidence. He could provide a detailed account of why, in this case, he believes an autocratic government currently conducting a brutal repression of its own citizens can be trusted to communicate honestly about it, given neither it, nor any similar autocratic government, has ever spoken honestly about similar situations in the past.

Fundamentally, the problem isn't whatever evidence does or does not exist. It is that Cook's memo is a weak, politician's attempt to justify a misdeed by making absurd claims for which he provides no evidence at all. He is trying to make a problem go away, not engage with a difficult situation as a human being.

Whereas the article says: "The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag. As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this."

It could be incompetence, but it seems much more like clear disingenuousness, which is a pretty common thing nowadays.

You can't just precede anything with "just playing devil's advocate for a moment" and make it immune from scrutiny, that's the intellectual equivalent of "just a prank". From the WP article, emphasis mine:

> explore the thought further using a valid reasoning

I also don't think that Cook's claims are extraordinary or at all difficult to believe, so perhaps that's the more fundamental disagreement you and I have.

IMHO it is far more likely that a representative from the mentioned Hong Kong government agency reached out to ask the app to be removed for the reasons given, and Apple complied with their request. If I'm correct, Apple is taking the supplied information at face value and also as a formal (legal) request.

In that light, the reason for the (internal) statement here is due to the press this app already received and because many employees of Apple have a humanitarian interest in Hong Kong - or even have friends and family who live there.

That's seriously disingenuous. His complaints is about how what Tim wrote doesn't make any sense, not about evidence. He only ask for evidence because he is logical, he knows that he may have not thought of everything and could be potentially wrong.

> The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag.

How could you explains this? I don't even need evidence, just a way for that to be possible (without outside coordination, that would be just absurd, simply use the same channel to coordinate instead).

Of course the app doesn't show individual officers, but I don't think it's reasonable to interpret Cook's memo as claiming that the app literally showed the location of individual officers. An app that shows hotspots of police activity can obviously be used to find and target individual officers for violence.

I'm not certain how else to read the passage below other than Cook claiming protestors used it to target individual officers somehow.

"However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence" -Tim Cook

It doesn't seem to me to take much of a leap of faith to think that China is applying pressure on the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau to get this app removed.

The Hong Kong police force is not a credible source of information, given that it is the chief antagonist in the Hong Kong protests, and that a core demand of the millions demonstrating is an independent investigation of its conduct.

Okay, but even if true, I've got very credible evidence that Twitter and Facebook (not to mention Safari!) have been used maliciously to victimize individuals and property. Will these apps be banned? If not, why not?

> So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims?

The complaint, I believe, is that nobody (including Cook) believes any of this. I'm sure he did get a message from the Hong Kong authorities (aka, the Chinese government) and at least one user in Hong Kong (aka, also the Chinese government) claiming the things he says they claimed. And he doesn't really believe they are true, but feels compelled to pretend he does, so he sent out the email, and now everyone else is being asked to pretend they're true too.

And Gruber is pointing out that they can't really be true, given the nature of the app. Which is quite right, but of course, it's beside the point. Cook isn't going to read Gruber's blog post, slap his forehead, and go "I've been hoodwinked!" and rescind the decision. He knows what he's doing.

> Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app?

The claim is not that the app facilitated very particular types of violence, which we do not know has occured. (Although again, even if true, that's not a good reason to ban the app.)

Couple that with the fact that no officers have been targeted individually in Hong Kong protests since they began, and you begin to see that the whole thing sounds fishy.

What is the law being broken that no one knows about, and the cases of violence no one has heard of?

This is the part I don't understand. Sky News UK has footage of protesters targetting an undercover police officer they'd discovered and setting him alight with a Molotov cocktail before trying to take his gun. It aired here on Australia's ABC News as well. (The Molotov cocktail incident happens at 0:17 https://youtu.be/VNGJK1k2MbY )

I'm with you on the other points, and I'm confident this app wasn't involved with that incident. But claiming the protestors have never been violent or targetted individual officers doesn't seem to match with reality.

(Of course, it's also worth questioning why there were undercover police with guns in the crowds in the first place.)

The complaint is that the claims are not credible given what we know of the app's capabilities. How could an app that highlights areas of heavy police activity be used to single out and attack lone officers without backup? If his claims were plausible, it might be different, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Why would one use this public app to target individual cops (when it doesn’t even reveal individual cops, and by virtue of its aggregation of data is likely to reveal groups of cops more often) when they could use any of the primary sources instead?

Maybe the other part is true, where criminals are using the app to target areas where cops are not present. That would actually make sense. But the first reason doesn’t add up.

Cook clearly made an extremely specific claim, not a general one about protesters being violent.

>the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers

Makes me sad we have lost soo much respect for liberty that people feel compelled to play "devil's advocate" in favor of a totalitarian regime.

I think it is clear that any "evidence" that has come from " Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau" should be rejected out right and not trusted at all

Further the fact that the app may have broken "local laws" should also have no impact at all on the discussion, we are talking about a Totalitarian regime with countless Human Rights violations, their local laws are objectively at odds with what anyone should consider just or proper

So it comes down "Does this app violate Apple Policies", given that apple like most companies write the rules so at any time anything can be a violation at their sole discretion then technically yes, but so could any app at any time.

At the end of the day allow me to Translate Apple's Statement SouthPark Style

"Like the NBA, Blizzard, and countless other companies, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom. Long Live the communist party of China"