Apple To Transfer Chinese iCloud Operations To Chinese Firm (bbc.com)

Apple's iCloud services in mainland China will be operated by a Chinese company from next month, the tech giant has confirmed, though Apple will still have access to all data stored on iCloud. The company said it had made the move to comply with the country's cloud computing regulations. iCloud accounts registered outside of China are not affected. BBC reports: The Chinese cyber security rules, introduced in July last year, include a requirement for companies to store all data within China. The firm, Guizhou on the Cloud Big Data (GCBD), is owned by the Guizhou provincial government in southern China. Guizhou is where Apple opened a $1 billion data center last year to meet the regulations. iCloud data will be transferred from February 28, Apple said. Customers living in mainland China who did not want to use iCloud operated by GCBD were given the option to terminate their account. Apple said the "partnership" with GCBD would allow it to "improve the speed and reliability of our iCloud services products while also complying with newly passed regulations that cloud services be operated by Chinese companies." It added that Apple had "strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems." However, some on social media have said the step gives Beijing more opportunity to monitor its citizens and others living in the country.

Comments

This worked so well for Microsoft /s

[greenwow]

But seriously, Mindtree that handles support for Microsoft is just a disaster. We opened several tickets in July when we first started moving to Azure, and not a single one of them has been resolved.

Re:First

[zlives]

China is not a free market...

Firewall

[sphealey]

The other half of the walnut is: what protections is Apple putting in place to ensure that once the PRC's intelligence agencies have penetrated the data center and systems located in the PRC (because they will) that this foot in the door will not give them leverage to penetrate the rest of the system located in the US and EU?

Re:Firewall

[zlives]

i think apple has an intel based CPU with IME to protect us from that.

Re:Firewall

[AHuxley]

The same protections and skill used to keep the NSA out?
PRISM (surveillance program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Firewall

[Avidiax]

The solution that I have seen in a couple of companies now is this:

The Chinese DC's are isolated. All network traffic from the Chinese DC to the other DCs are whitelisted (from the non-China DC), with a long process involved to get anything added to the whitelist. Typically, only backup, migration, and monitoring are allowed. No keying material valid in a non-China-DC is allowed in the Chinese DCs. This means that any migrations will involve reencryption with new keys. Automated and manual audits of inter-DC traffic are performed.

Re:Firewall

[AHuxley]

The national internet is a China wide intranet.
Want to invest and build a brand in China? Laws are clear about how encryption will be used, the needs of law enforcement.
All international networks in and out are tracked back to see if they are a VPN thats new, unknown to the gov and mil in China.
Some VPN's will work in China at full speed and without question. Why? The government gets to se all its own citizens who are trying to use the service.
For that agreement foreigners get to feel like the VPN is winning with a fast VPN that got past the gov due to skills..
The same for other brands. Help the communist party and all is good.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Who's More Evil At This Point?

[kenwd0elq]

All the big tech companies seem to be in a giant rush to knuckle under to totalitarian regimes, and I'm not sure who's worse at this point. Google, whose motto seems to be "Sure, Be Evil!" or Apple, who is about to turn over all the records for every Chinese Apple customer to the Chinese Government?

Re:Who's More Evil At This Point?

[Dutch Gun]

This question is one I've genuinely struggled with... should private companies refuse to do business with totalitarian regimes like China? I used to think "yes", but how well did that really work out for us with Cuba? Refusing to engage in commerce doesn't seem to meaningfully affect regime change any more than bombing cities won WWII (at least by itself) - it mostly just makes people even more miserable.

In the case of Apple, it's not like refusing to allow iCloud services to Chinese citizens will somehow make them immune from government surveillance. After all, you *already* are required to have a government-snooping app installed right on your phone. It's apparently the law in China that a Chinese-owned firm is required to operate any sort of service there. It would be more newsworthy if this was NOT happening.

Why not move manufacturing?

[ITRambo]

Apple is being pushed around by the Chinese government. They really need to begin building automated plants in the US. China can suck it. The fall of the Western world started when we gave China the know-how and resources to build our cheap stuff more cheaply. Then they moved on t to better stuff. Now they're controlling the whole system. Apple will eventually lose much of their company if they stay in China. Get out now. Apple: you can survive on Western profits, you sellouts.

You're not running them anymore, Apple.

[SeaFox]

It added that Apple had "strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems."

That doesn't mean a whole lot when the Chinese company is the one running the physical machines, Apple. Or are you saying there's no way a MTTM attack can be introduced?