> in a few years the offline Notes app will be phoning home if you write speech criticising the government in China.

A totalitarian autocracy like China does not need this technology to search for wrongspeech, sadly. You are of course aware that all Chinese iCloud users get their data stored in a special set of datacenters that Apple actually doesn't control.

The problem is, that this will be done in other, (currently) freer countries. Eg. Reddit has removed a lot of anti-china posts in the last few years. And of course, local leaders will use this to find anti-local-leader stuff on their citizens phones too.

This seems to be done voluntarily by NVIDIA, at least partially. While in Seattle I set up geo-blocking on my LAN as an experiment. Later when I tried to create an NVIDIA account I couldn't because it was attempting to store my PII at nvidia.cn. When I changed the url to nvidia.com everything worked just fine. I've always wondered what non-evil reasons one could use to explain that choice by NVIDIA. Ping was at least 2x longer to .cn.

I agree with you 100% — the only solution I’ve found workable is limiting my use of the technology itself as much as possible.

Or regulation saying that this is illegal, because it invades users privacy too much.

Which'd be fine if we had one global government with world wide jurisdiction. Or technology choices from companies which couldn't be pressured by governments outside your personal regulation jurisdiction.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for those regulations to become law in, say, Chine or Turkey or Saudi Arabia. I'd bet even Israel won't pass them, surely NSO have enough political lobbying swing (and probably also suitable blackmail material on sitting politicians).

>Which'd be fine if we had one global government with world wide jurisdiction.

I wholeheartedly disagree. A world wide goverment would be catastrophic for whistleblowing. Atleast as a whistleblower you can live somewhat safely in a country opposing your own. With a one world government you would have nowhere to run.

And I wouldn't expect them to protect citizen's interests any better than current governments do. Contrary, I think this lack of balance in the world would embolden them further.

They sell software designed to break into people's phones to oppressive regimes all over the planet. They definitely have the capability and requisite lack of ethics to compromise their own politicians; there's no probably about it.

But we don't have a global government, so the next best thing is for individual countries to pass such regulation, which would prevent products violating privacy like this from being offered and sold in those countries.

Think of GDPR, which is essentially each member of the EU saying in unison, "your product/service must comply with these data protection laws, or you can't legally do business with any of our citizens".

Come to think of it, I wonder if this Apple thing would even fly under GDPR?

> Come to think of it, I wonder if this Apple thing would even fly under GDPR?

Possibly? I’m not a lawyer, but if this is about compliance with a legal obligation, and they’re under that category of pressure? I think GDPR would allow that?

Certainly seems more likely allowed than the stuff Facebook complained Apple was preventing them from doing.

You could you exclusively free software instead. It respects your freedoms.

> It's still really, really bad.

The OP still addresses the inaccurate statement (presented in the form of a question for plausible deniability).