It’s not entirely clear that the location stuff is related to North Korea. A lot of the heavily restrictive laws are done under the guise of privacy.

It’s funny how the two things you mentioned are related to a particular quagmire of mine which was that my baby son misplaced my phone inside our place in Korea. I had absolutely zero way of finding it. I didn’t want to buy a shutter-compromised phone so I just waited a month to buy a phone in the US.

It’s just absolutely bizarre that, in this modern age, an iPhone briefly going out of sight means losing it forever. (I think he threw the phone away, as he started to enjoy putting things in the trash can.)

Isn’t the location thing that if Apple were to store any location data, it would have to keep a lasting record of said data for the government to access instead of its 24 hour deletion policy?

Yeah, I've read the same, which is that Korea's supposed privacy policies actually decrease privacy and security because they mandate retention policies that, supposedly, Apple et al aren't willing to comply with.

It's like the whole ActiveX debacle. I just don't understand what's in lawmakers' heads.

Actually that is mandated by Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearing Institute (consisted of banks).

Looks like it's mandated just to play a ping-pong game of "who is the culprit of this data leak" that usually concludes into user's improper installation of "Security Software".

They don't even enable the 'play a sound' feature and "you are connected to your phone from your watch"?

Can‘t you do it the old-fashioned way and call the phone? If it’s on silent, it might make it harder, but it still makes a buzzing sound since it vibrates.

> Japan has similar legislation that came from men taking up-skirt photos in public places (trains, etc.).

It does not. This is a carrier requirement, not the law. That's why you can evade it so easily.

Although an overseas Android phone will work on Japanese networks you won’t be able to use Google Pay. In order to use Google Pay you need a phone that has NFC-FeliCa support and only Android phones sold in Japan have it.

iPhones support it anywhere. Newer Google Pixel (at least 5 and 6?) devices would need to be modded to Japanese SKU for it to work. Comes down to manufacturers having to pay Sony for it to be enabled and while FeliCa 4.1 supposed to support provisioning after the fact, they just don't have a system setup like Apple does.

I'm in Japan now, and from my experience, that's incorrect. Google pay works just fine everywhere for regular payments. But you won't be able to use your phone to replace anything IC card related (like contactless payment cards for transportation).

> Japan has similar legislation that came from men taking up-skirt photos in public places (trains, etc.).

This seems to be incorrect, it appears to be a network policy from the carriers not binding legislation. More info on it can be found here: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_...

It's related to data sovereignty laws, I'd bet. South Korea is very VERY paranoid about the GIS data about the country, to the point that there are laws that basically say "if you get GIS data from Korea you are not allowed to export it in any way." The Korean language OSM page for mapping SK is an interesting place to start: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ko:첫_걸음

It would not surprise me if "Find My iPhone" would have to be completely and totally rebuilt from the ground up in SK and run on SK infrastructure in order for it to not be considered exporting of survey data.

Every map of South Korea must be served from... South Korea up until a certain point. You can see this if you open up Google Maps and zoom in.

There's a special version of OSM that has military bases conveniently ignored for the purpose of in-country usage: https://tiles.osm.kr/

Here, South Korea is only visible as a series of indiscernible land shapes -- North Korea has more detail: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7704632,128.4760504,6.94z?en...

Zoom in one level and if you're on a particularly bad internet connection, South Korea will slowly chug its way into existence: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7701121,128.6819944,7.94z?en...

Bing's view of South Korea is even weirder, since they don't use vector graphics for that part of the world. You can see where the labels will overlap, with English labels being covered by English vector labels: https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=35.883894%7E127.933616&lvl=9.0 ( https://i.postimg.cc/SRnZfgHC/image.png )

At some zoom levels in Bing Maps, you can see they're using a VERY old render, sometimes old enough that destroyed buildings are still visible or routes that no longer exist are still there. It uses American-style highway signs and with a high resolution screen such as a modern 4K panel you can easily see where the bitmap graphics that have been hauled over are falling apart.