A now-fixed bug in Ios caused Chinese-localized Iphones to reboot any
time the user tried to enter the character combination for a Taiwanese
flag or the word “Taiwan”; the bug was caused by Apple’s China-only
censorship and surveillance software.
One of the Chinese government’s most sensitive no-go zones are the
separatist movements that agitate for independent home-rule in Taiwan,
Tibet, Xianjing and other territories. Part of the suppression of these
movements is a broad prohibition on the display of their national flags.
Apple’s bug was apparently triggered by a routine that flagged messages
containing potential dissident sentiments for examination by Chinese
political officers who would make decisions about whether to censure the
phone’s owner for expressing prohibited ideas.
The Chinese mobile market is responsible for as many Apple handset sales
as all of the EU combined. Apple has made major concessions to maintain
access to this market, including moving Icloud to Chinese servers,
blocking VPNs from its App Store, and reportedly backdooring its
software to give Chinese domestic surveillance agencies covert access to
users’ data.
Apple is not alone in its complicity with Chinese state human rights
abuses; all domestic Android companies certainly censor/surveil as much
(or more) than Apple does; other western companies are likewise bound to
participate in Chinese state surveillance as a condition of selling in
the Chinese market.
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