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Apple Refutes Report On iPhone Threat To China's National Security
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers," the company said Sunday in a bilingual statement on its China website. Users have to make the choice to enable the iPhones to calculate their locations, while "Apple does not track users' locations — Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," the company said. The statement was in response to allegations by China's top state broadcaster that iOS7 software and its "Frequent Location" service posed a security risk. The data can be accessed easily, although labelled as "encrypted," and may lead to the disclosure of "state secrets," CCTV said.
"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services."
could just as easily mean, 'we havent worked WITH govt agencies.. but when they told us to step aside and let their devs in to commandeer a subroutine, we turned a blind/black-box eye'
We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about.
oh, they 'feel strongly' about it? how comforting. and how do they define 'allow'? notice they dont say govt/others never HAD or HAVE access, just that it's not 'allowed'.. mmmkay..
Saying it ain't so don't make it not so.
Apple failed to mention the bit about, if a US government agency had contacted them and requested information or for a backdoor to be put into their device, they'd be required by federal law to lie about it or face charges of treason. In fact, given how unrestrained the NSA is at this time, this press release may have even been written at the request of a national security letter. It's terrifying that this is where we're at... but here we are none the less.
Next up, the NSA releases a statement: "Edward Snowden is a traitor and a jerk! Look how he's hurting nice companies like Apple!"
Protectionism isn't something the G8 generally likes and has come under fire lately. Based on some things i've seen lately, I believe China (and perhaps india) have been spanked for their usual nonsense.
So maybe those people are now trying a different approach, rather than the normal protectionism that chinese companies engage in (using only their own suppliers, designing out foreign chips, bringing all mfg and design work to them so that they can control the supply chain), they're trying to hide behind FUD.