Authoritarian countries are the least of the worries. There's a large class of illegal imagery that is policed in democratic countries: copyrighted media. We are only two steps away from having your phone rat you to the MPAA because you downloaded a movie and stored it on your phone.

I can guarantee that some industry bigwigs are salivating at the prospect of this tech. Imagine youtube copyright strikes but local to your device.

This would have been a huge fear of mine if this was 10 or 15 years ago and legitimate publishers were still engaging in copyright litigation for individual noncommercial pirates. The RIAA stopped doing individual lawsuits because it was surprisingly expensive to ruin people's lives that way over a handful of songs. This largely also applies to the MPAA as well. The only people still doing this in bulk are copyright trolling outfits - companies like Prenda Law and Malibu Media. They make fake porn, covertly share it and lie to the judge about it, sue you, and then offer a quick and easy settlement route.

(Yes, I know, it sounds like I'm splitting hairs distinguishing between copyright maximalism and copyright trolling. Please, humor me.)

What copyright maximalists really want is an end to the legal protections for online platforms (DMCA 512 safe-harbor) so they can go after notorious markets directly. They already partially accomplished this in the EU. It's way more efficient from their end to have one throat to choke. Once the maximalists get what they want, platforms that want to be legitimate would be legally compelled to implement filters, ala YouTube Content ID. But those filters would apply to content that's published on the platform, not just things on your device. Remember: they're not interested in your local storage. They want to keep their movies and music off of YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and Facebook.

Furthermore, they largely already have the scanning regime they want. Public video sites make absolutely no sense to E2E encrypt; and most sites that deal in video already have a content fingerprinting solution. It turns out it was already easy enough to withhold content licenses to platforms that accept user uploads, unless they agreed to also start scanning those uploads.

(Side note: I genuinely think that the entire concept of safe harbors for online platforms is going to go away, just as soon as the proposals to do so stop being transparently partisan end-runs around the 1st Amendment. Pre-Internet, the idea that an entity could broadcast speech without having been considered to be the publisher of it didn't really exist. Publishers were publishers and that was that.)

One reason I haven't used itunes in years, and don't use iOS, is that I have a huge collection of mp3s. It's almost all of music which I bought and burned off CDs over decades, and it's become just stupidly difficult to organize your own mp3 collection via Apple's players. Even back in the ipod days, you could put your mp3s on an ipod but you needed piracy ware to rip them back off. I can easily see this leading to people like me getting piracy notices and having to explain that no, I bought this music, since we're now in a world where not that many people have their own unlocked music collection anymore.

They still sell iTunes Match subscriptions, a service entirely premised on you having your own MP3s.

You could access the music no problem, just some metadata was messed up.

> Authoritarian countries are the least of the worries.

That really depends. And is quite a strange, perhaps worrying, take.

Because, for many people, copyright strikes are the least of their problems.

Not that I disagree on it being an issue.

The only authoritarian country that holds any sway over Apple is China and China can easily just ban iPhones if they feel like it, especially with Xi Jinping in charge.

Democratic countries are much more of a danger because Apple has offices in them and cannot easily pull out of the market if they feel the laws are unconscionable.

Russia already forced Apple to allow pre-installing government approved apps on local iPhones: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334641/apple-follows-ru...

I think Apple is pretty tied to China both as a market for their goods and as the place they get manufacturing done.

All these years I have heard of people getting in trouble for sharing copyrighted materials with others but never for possessing them or downloading them (BitTorrent somewhat blurs the line here). And there's nothing illegal about ripping your own CDs. I find this scenario far-fetched. iTunes Match would seem to be a longrunning honeypot if you take this seriously.

Apple is a fairly large company, that gives them some monetary leverage over governments. It's not as simple as you make it seem, I think.

Should this fact be reassuring or even more frightening ?

Because it’s something to push back against governments by saying « I can’t ». But it’s a societal issue if a corporation can say « I don’t want » to a government.

It’s really not the same thing and Apple just burned their « I can’t » card and are implying they can just say « no » to governments. Which is quite an even more dystopian thing.

They can say "no" but they have to cope with the fallout from that.

The statement from Apple is that they will say no. Whether that actually ever happens is something we will see, one way or another.

Apple won't say no to a court order.

Of course they won't. The idea of a company refusing to comply with the laws of the countries they operate in purely out of some grand sense of principle just seems naive. Especially if it's the country where HQ is.

China just hung it's biggest tech companies out to dry.

Do you really think they would care in the slightest about banning iPhone?

Or that Putin cares more about people not being able to buy what amounts to a luxury item, than being able to hunt down opposition supporters?

Yeah I'm pretty sure that this wasn't an easy decision for the Chinese government. Even in dictatorships you can't afford to piss off the population too much.

I'm not sure a move to soak rich guys getting a little too big for their britches is that unpopular with the general population.

Google is pretty big too but they implemented the filtering in China as requested. Then when they decided they didn't want to do that anymore there went their site.

Is there a guarantee that Apple will retain their monetary status, or even, money will be a leverage over governments in future?

Who wants to be the government who shuts down Apple? These are politicians we are talking about.

Those already doing far worse than banning a consumer electronics company's products?

And, in all honesty, there's a lot of those.

I meant in the context of U.S. governments. What Democrat administration wants to ban Apple? What Republican administration wants to ban Apple?

Sounds like political suicide on either side: government interference with the country's largest company, an iconic brand, for no reason other than to hopefully spy more on your citizens.

The concern being raised is about some unnamed authoritarian government without US legal norms, though.

Analogy: the prospect of “vaccine passports” for jurisdictional movement and access is getting serious consideration at all levels of U.S. governance. Not long ago, anything so resembling “papiere, bitte” commonly inspired a sense of violent resistance against totalitarianism. Just takes one engaging “but this is different” to reframe the worst of humanity to popular compulsion.

There is nothing novel about them besides the name.

Who wants to be the government that bans Winnie the Pooh?

Ohh... oops.

Chinese Apple users already have their data treated differently.

Any chance this is already operational there?