techrede

Yes, PGP/GPG is affected

Overall Amnesty has made a reasonable assessment of the issue. Apple is clearly in a difficult position and has to make compromises to keep doing business in China.

>> The best way to protect your personal information from being accessed by the Chinese government is to avoid storing it on servers inside China.

Fair enough, but as anyone who has spent a fair amount of time working and living in China knows, access to services hosted outside of the country can be difficult, if not impossible, without a VPN. Beijing's current plan, is to block access to any non-approved VPN services by the end of March 2018. Assuming that ban goes into effect, it will effectively cut users off from services not approved for the China market. Whether or not this will include Apple services hosted abroad remains to be seen.

Yes, perhaps that's true but it doesn't mean that Apple is completely in the clear on this issue. A much more detailed account of iCloud security can be found on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16449326

> Almost everyone does something that can be construed as being illegal. By allowing unfettered access to private information, this makes it much easier for laws to be selectively enforced in ways that benefit the government.

Exactly. It could be something as simple as guilt by association. Even though you might not have done anything illegal yourself, you may have the contact information of someone who is on a watchlist or has been convicted of a crime. For example, China is looking into developing a social credit rating system, any association an individual has to persons who the government consider less reputable could have real impacts on their credit rating.

Sure, many users in China can use other services, but it seems to be a no win situation for most people. Unless you’re technically sophisticated, you’re unlikely to pursue alternatives which provide a greater degree of security and require a bit of technical know how.

At best you can say that Chinese users will likely be no worse off using iCloud than they would using any other China-based service. Unfortunately that is no consolation for anyone who might have sensitive data.