Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
The timing of the change seems quite conspicuous [1], and it's also weird that Apple would introduce this in China first and only roll it out to the rest of the world next year. The same article mentions that Apple blocks the Taiwanese flag emoji in China, for which it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship.
To be fair: (1) it seems like the update landed recently, and (2) the article you linked does cite the same reasoning as the Twitter posts. Even if was a little ahead of the more recent Zero Covid protests, it seems like AirDrop's been a known vector in China to share government criticism, which is why Apple's cracking down.
That's interesting that this was rolled out a few weeks ago, however the article also says:
> Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.
At the time people, especially college students around that area (lots of universities nearby), were using AirDrop to share photos of the protest, because social medium was heavily censored. University administrators were tasked to make sure iPhone-carrying students to disable allowing AirDrop from everyone to stop the spread of the images.
A few weeks later, iOS public betas were found to come with the change to limiting AirDrop to 10 minutes, and nothing about it was ever mentioned in release note.
Was Apple pressured by the CCP to rush this? I don't know. Look at the evidence and judge by yourself.
But there's a more nuanced perspective.
It is rumored that CCP has the ability to actually track and uncover the identity of iOS devices sending AirDrop. Think about it: how else AirDrop can limit to receive from contacts only? If so, AirDrop would provide a false sense of anonymity and deniability, and Apple would put some of its customers in jeopardy if they do nothing.
By limiting AirDrop from everyone to 10 minutes, Apple achieved three objectives:
1. They showed compliance (they have to, if they want to keep the business in China);
2. They avoided the potential reputation damage in the scenario where protesters are caught AirDropping offensive materials (e.g. “iPhones aren't as secure as Apple advertises after all”);
3. They closed a loophole in which people get spammed (yes, allowing AirDrop from everyone gets you mostly spams anyway).
The “mistake” Apple made was that it did not a) rush the change to all regions, and b) mention it explicitly in release note, therefore completely exposed them to the first objective and failed to convey the nuances.
Why does it seem "the right thing"? I mean, it's pretty stupid to actually keep it open for everyone forever, but if I want that (and I don't know why it was even an option, but I assume somebody wants that) — that's my business, it doesn't hurt anyone. Also, limiting it to 10 minutes doesn't help, since I just can keep turning it on and on it seems.
Adding one more option could make some sense, but it's weird anyways. Why arbitrary 10 minutes? How turning it for 10 minutes in a crowded place is better than turning it on for an hour? It's silly.
A setting with 10 minutes default would be reasonable change for users sake, in case they forget to turn it off.
Force 10 minutes with no optoon to turn it back? Yeah...
> but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
The China told them to and they complied. They have every interest in China's government keeping their people in check so the Apple factory production continues without problems.
It's because recently there's report on the internet that some people are receiving nude photos from random guys over AirDrop (*on subways), and the fact that sexual harassment charges in China are pressed rather weakly.
I legitimately don't understand how this has been spun into some sort of pro-censorship move. Leaving your phone open to getting AirDrop-ed by anyone in the vicinity just seems like a terrible idea in general, but especially in China. Apple is helping the authoritarian dictatorship by checks notes not having your phone advertise to everyone nearby that it can receive files from anyone?
The ability for dissidents to airdrop messages to passers-by seems silly as well. All of a sudden spamming people is good due to the content of the message? Never mind that there's nothing stopping the other side from doing the same thing.
It ultimately feels to me like the country that's always in the news for hackers and ubiquitous surveillance should be the last place in the world you want to have AirDrop on, period. Even the contacts-only mode has leaked personal information in the past.
For context: AirDrop was one of the only ways protesters had to communicate en-masse.
Signal is unsafe for Chinese protesters, since it requires SMS verification upon signup and is therefore linked to your identity.[0] Mesh networks are the only real solution there, and AirDrop is about the only mainstream one. AirDrop has been used by Asian protesters for years.[1] I highly recomment you read the full China Digital Times article, which gives excellent context, and lets these protesters explain the value of AirDrop in their own words.[1]
Apple's timing is unmistakeably suspicious; keep in mind that there have been protests for weeks, which preceded the iOS update.
It must also be pointed out that Apple issued an official statement to Western media outlets that the goal was to prevent spam.[2] At no point did Apple ever admit that this was done to follow any government demand. It's unknown whether Apple could be under a Chinese gag-order, but we shouldn't speculate that it's the case unless experts say it's likely. If Apple is complying with a Chinese government orders, then it has an ethical duty to make that public, and again, we have, as of yet, no reason to assume there are gag orders related to this. Apple deserves criticism for the update, and for trying to hide its true purpose.
Note: AirDrop is unsafe for broadcasting message anonymously. It will also broadcast your hashed phone number and email[1], which can be reversed by rainbow table.
Signal can't be used at all in China anyway since the verification texts are blocked. I've tried contacting Signal support about this (I live in China and want to use Signal) but as soon as I tell them I love in China and have a Chinese phone number they stop replying :)
To be fair, it's the only real solution anywhere, and it's just us who is playing dumb and pretending SMS verification is absolutely fine and totally acceptable for a "secure messenger" in our free and happy democratic society. Jesus, the level of absurdity here...
There are gag orders in the US and UK too, which companies have to follow or they are breaking the law. Are they unethical too?
Or do you mean, it is unethical for apple to not tell Americans what the Chinese government has asked them to do within China, to Chinese citizens, in order to benefit from being legally in good standing and able to continue to do commerce within China?
If so, then is it unethical for them to follow US gag orders and not tell the Chinese public?
I have to admit that when you actually look at the details this is a rather perplexing change. Ditto for reading the comments here.
Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder.
I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, including for the people who are using it to exchange information during protests since it disables a vector for tracking devices.
I'm a little confused by the "Apple's doing bad here" sentiment. The easier to implement, and definitely more effective solution would have been to just disable the Everyone feature completely. Just remove it from the menu. This would have been something like
action.isEnabled = self.isInChina
Instead, they went through the effort to actually make it still there, but time bombed. They had to add a timeout function, and record the time it was enabled, etc. And at the end of the day, the activist/protestor at a street gathering now has the inconvenience of re-enabling "everyone" 6 times an hour.
For me, this basically feels like lip service to the Chinese government, but otherwise a finger. Maybe I'm beeing too myopic.
Yeah, I quite agree. Reposting my comment from above here because this makes a better thread ... I think this 10 minute delay might actually be intended to be protective for the protestors. Any radio transmitter is a beacon that can be localized and destroyed. In serious warfare this is a major issue. "I'm up, they see me, I'm down" is drilled into military operators early and often.
I guess it works both ways though. If everyone had it on, you can't easily arrest every iPhone user. And people could spread information really quickly. Now you have to turn it on for 10 minutes at a time so you aren't organising that mass protest as fast.
Any Apple employee (or really, any large-company employee) would agree that this change is months of work. From the original problem statement (people get spammed when they leave AirDrop set to Everyone), to many strongly-opinionated discussions on how to solve (There's not a problem; Pop up a reminder to disable after an hour; Enable only for some period of time [5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, user-configured]), and then arguments about how to phrase the UI (yes, even for something this small) and mock-ups and product reviews, and then development + QA and internal/Livability testing, and then coordinating for the actual iOS release.
It's a mountain of work, which would have kicked off a long time before any of these protests.
Normally it would be several months of work, but if it was a top level company directive (e.g. from the CEO) it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum. Note that protests have been going on sporadically for this entire year.
And is it standard procedure for Apple to release these kinds of changes only in China? They're clearly putting massive priority on this change launching in that geography ASAP (for one reason or another), so it doesn't seem hard to believe that this bypassed most of their other process as well.
Sooner or later Apple will have to losen its grip on the device because if they not, counties will simply try to use Apple as enforcer. Just as with privacy the best road being "We don't have that data", the best road with this is to be able to say "We don't have control over it".
Time for a new operating system (if we didn't already hit that mark with the 2013 NSA leaks).
Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei: they all exist at the pleasure of the state. Please ignore their glitzy PR-laden presentations about protecting people's privacy and upholding human rights. They will sell you out in a second if it's convenient.
On the mobile side of things, we need, at the barest minimum:
- a web based OS with granular permissions for any application that needs to access hardware APIs (just like a web browser)
- a general-purpose mobile SOC that hasn't hitched its wagon to Samsung/Apple/Huawei orders.
- FairPhone style modular, user replaceable parts, and to encourage an interest in self-repair.
- no native-app lock-ins. it's not 2007, the majority of apps people use run fine on a mobile web browser.
- significant efforts to fund tech literacy. More than a billion people have smartphones as their first computing device. They don't have the benefit of past knowledge, so they simply accept the locked-down nature of smartphones without question. Meanwhile in 2011, we could openly port Windows Phone 7, Android OS and the original Windows Mobile 6.5 on the same phone.
The power dynamic between China and Apple doesn't get enough attention. Apple needs China, but China doesn't need Apple.
There are few if any places capable of manufacturing the amount of products China does for Apple, especially at the price. China is also an enormous market to Apple.
I don't agree with the treatment of protestors or the use of technology to surveil its citizens, but the bottom line is that in China, China calls the shots. Apple can either get in line or manufacture its phones elsewhere.
And maybe they should not take the high moral ground on other issues, telling others how to think and behave, when they themselves are happy to accept filthy lucre in return for compromising their own ethics.
I personally cannot stand these sleazy companies, happy to "take a stand" when it costs them nothing (cheap public relations!!!) but it's a "complicated world" and these issues are not simple, when they themselves bear the cost.
In what way does this censor anyone? Censorship would be Apple disabling Airdrop altogether, not coming up with some compromise so that its users could still do their work.
Imagine you want to invite a lot of people you don't know, to a protest. This is generally really difficult to do in China without being spotted for re-education. In contrast, Airdrop was previously a good way to do this discreetly. Now it's useless. That is censorship.
How does this actually limit the dissemination of information? You have 10 minutes, and then can reinitiate? Seems like a reasonable security precaution.
Regardless of where it's rolled out first, this is a good example of reducing the attack surface from remote exploits (which China is known to have and use at contests like Tianfu Cup). Seems in line with changes they made with "Lockdown Mode" that users can opt into.
I want to believe this is just badly timed. I don't know, I very often want to AirDrop with someone I don't know or have a contact for -- clients of clients, usually... And I've found I set it to 'Everyone' and forget. Which isn't ideal on the odd plane-trip with people trying to be funny...
Even if they really did this motivated by avoiding spam, the fact that dissidents were (not just hypothetically) using it to organize is literally a reason to leave it.
But rolling it out to China first is pretty damn suspicious of what their "true" motives were too.
Sure the timing of this tweet is weird, as people pointed out, that the change actually happened a few weeks ago (there were tweets about it then, but those are mainly in Chinese). But protesting via airdrop has been happening in China for months before this change.
Even if we give Apple the benefit of doubt, that they actually planned this change long time ago unrelated to any protests (spams maybe), and the plan is to roll it out to a market for testing before roll out to all markets, with the protests they _should_ change the market for the test. Not changing the plan (that's _assuming_ they really have good intention aka fight spams behind it) will make themselves look bad and they have no one else to blame.
[+] [-] jsnell|3 years ago|reply
Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|3 years ago|reply
1: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...
[+] [-] standardUser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maximus9000|3 years ago|reply
> Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.
[+] [-] freefruit|3 years ago|reply
It was brought in because of protests in mainland China. Just not because of the current ones, but previous ones.
[+] [-] riobard|3 years ago|reply
Not hard at all.
On Oct 13, 2022 this protest happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Sitong_Bridge_protest), which the CCP considered a serious offense, potentially on the same level of the 1989 protest.
At the time people, especially college students around that area (lots of universities nearby), were using AirDrop to share photos of the protest, because social medium was heavily censored. University administrators were tasked to make sure iPhone-carrying students to disable allowing AirDrop from everyone to stop the spread of the images.
A few weeks later, iOS public betas were found to come with the change to limiting AirDrop to 10 minutes, and nothing about it was ever mentioned in release note.
Was Apple pressured by the CCP to rush this? I don't know. Look at the evidence and judge by yourself.
But there's a more nuanced perspective.
It is rumored that CCP has the ability to actually track and uncover the identity of iOS devices sending AirDrop. Think about it: how else AirDrop can limit to receive from contacts only? If so, AirDrop would provide a false sense of anonymity and deniability, and Apple would put some of its customers in jeopardy if they do nothing.
By limiting AirDrop from everyone to 10 minutes, Apple achieved three objectives:
1. They showed compliance (they have to, if they want to keep the business in China); 2. They avoided the potential reputation damage in the scenario where protesters are caught AirDropping offensive materials (e.g. “iPhones aren't as secure as Apple advertises after all”); 3. They closed a loophole in which people get spammed (yes, allowing AirDrop from everyone gets you mostly spams anyway).
The “mistake” Apple made was that it did not a) rush the change to all regions, and b) mention it explicitly in release note, therefore completely exposed them to the first objective and failed to convey the nuances.
[+] [-] krick|3 years ago|reply
Adding one more option could make some sense, but it's weird anyways. Why arbitrary 10 minutes? How turning it for 10 minutes in a crowded place is better than turning it on for an hour? It's silly.
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
Force 10 minutes with no optoon to turn it back? Yeah...
> but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
The China told them to and they complied. They have every interest in China's government keeping their people in check so the Apple factory production continues without problems.
Follow the money and all that
[+] [-] yangvz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WiSaGaN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noncoml|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rosywoozlechan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonnage|3 years ago|reply
The ability for dissidents to airdrop messages to passers-by seems silly as well. All of a sudden spamming people is good due to the content of the message? Never mind that there's nothing stopping the other side from doing the same thing.
It ultimately feels to me like the country that's always in the news for hackers and ubiquitous surveillance should be the last place in the world you want to have AirDrop on, period. Even the contacts-only mode has leaked personal information in the past.
[+] [-] concinds|3 years ago|reply
Signal is unsafe for Chinese protesters, since it requires SMS verification upon signup and is therefore linked to your identity.[0] Mesh networks are the only real solution there, and AirDrop is about the only mainstream one. AirDrop has been used by Asian protesters for years.[1] I highly recomment you read the full China Digital Times article, which gives excellent context, and lets these protesters explain the value of AirDrop in their own words.[1]
Apple's timing is unmistakeably suspicious; keep in mind that there have been protests for weeks, which preceded the iOS update.
It must also be pointed out that Apple issued an official statement to Western media outlets that the goal was to prevent spam.[2] At no point did Apple ever admit that this was done to follow any government demand. It's unknown whether Apple could be under a Chinese gag-order, but we shouldn't speculate that it's the case unless experts say it's likely. If Apple is complying with a Chinese government orders, then it has an ethical duty to make that public, and again, we have, as of yet, no reason to assume there are gag orders related to this. Apple deserves criticism for the update, and for trying to hide its true purpose.
[0]: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/159707255662827929...
[1]: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/apple-lim...
[+] [-] jinseokim|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://privatedrop.github.io/
[+] [-] DivineBicycle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flumpcakes|3 years ago|reply
There are gag orders in the US and UK too, which companies have to follow or they are breaking the law. Are they unethical too?
Or do you mean, it is unethical for apple to not tell Americans what the Chinese government has asked them to do within China, to Chinese citizens, in order to benefit from being legally in good standing and able to continue to do commerce within China?
If so, then is it unethical for them to follow US gag orders and not tell the Chinese public?
[+] [-] gorkish|3 years ago|reply
Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder.
I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, including for the people who are using it to exchange information during protests since it disables a vector for tracking devices.
[+] [-] travisgriggs|3 years ago|reply
For me, this basically feels like lip service to the Chinese government, but otherwise a finger. Maybe I'm beeing too myopic.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralfd|3 years ago|reply
Plus they led everyone know about China in rolling the feature change there first.
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andromeduck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|3 years ago|reply
This is not in response to this particular protest. iOS16 just dropped, so the timing was coincidental I guess.
[+] [-] khazhoux|3 years ago|reply
It's a mountain of work, which would have kicked off a long time before any of these protests.
[+] [-] ipsum2|3 years ago|reply
See this article about a protest from Peking university from May 2022: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac...
and Shanghai in April 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents...
And in Henan in June 2022: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149
[+] [-] randyrand|3 years ago|reply
If it is low risk, it could make it into a dot release with minimal effort.
But yes, minimum time frame a month standard, maybe a couple weeks if it came from high up (which it did) and was time sensitive.
[+] [-] jsnell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fimdomeio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notpachet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei: they all exist at the pleasure of the state. Please ignore their glitzy PR-laden presentations about protecting people's privacy and upholding human rights. They will sell you out in a second if it's convenient.
On the mobile side of things, we need, at the barest minimum:
- a web based OS with granular permissions for any application that needs to access hardware APIs (just like a web browser)
- a general-purpose mobile SOC that hasn't hitched its wagon to Samsung/Apple/Huawei orders.
- FairPhone style modular, user replaceable parts, and to encourage an interest in self-repair.
- no native-app lock-ins. it's not 2007, the majority of apps people use run fine on a mobile web browser.
- significant efforts to fund tech literacy. More than a billion people have smartphones as their first computing device. They don't have the benefit of past knowledge, so they simply accept the locked-down nature of smartphones without question. Meanwhile in 2011, we could openly port Windows Phone 7, Android OS and the original Windows Mobile 6.5 on the same phone.
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
* Apple is not a free speech advocate
* Apple builds their products with unethical labor
[+] [-] dkokelley|3 years ago|reply
There are few if any places capable of manufacturing the amount of products China does for Apple, especially at the price. China is also an enormous market to Apple.
I don't agree with the treatment of protestors or the use of technology to surveil its citizens, but the bottom line is that in China, China calls the shots. Apple can either get in line or manufacture its phones elsewhere.
[+] [-] lazyeye|3 years ago|reply
And maybe they should not take the high moral ground on other issues, telling others how to think and behave, when they themselves are happy to accept filthy lucre in return for compromising their own ethics.
I personally cannot stand these sleazy companies, happy to "take a stand" when it costs them nothing (cheap public relations!!!) but it's a "complicated world" and these issues are not simple, when they themselves bear the cost.
Seriously, they can go F themselves.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] huslage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blamazon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyeye|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...
But never mind, they have rainbow hashtags and censor pepe memes so they are the good guys...
[+] [-] miguelazo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shellcromancer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photoGrant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
But rolling it out to China first is pretty damn suspicious of what their "true" motives were too.
[+] [-] sfusato|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fishywang|3 years ago|reply
Sure the timing of this tweet is weird, as people pointed out, that the change actually happened a few weeks ago (there were tweets about it then, but those are mainly in Chinese). But protesting via airdrop has been happening in China for months before this change.
Even if we give Apple the benefit of doubt, that they actually planned this change long time ago unrelated to any protests (spams maybe), and the plan is to roll it out to a market for testing before roll out to all markets, with the protests they _should_ change the market for the test. Not changing the plan (that's _assuming_ they really have good intention aka fight spams behind it) will make themselves look bad and they have no one else to blame.
[+] [-] nipponese|3 years ago|reply