[HN Gopher] TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with stat...
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TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed
workaround
Author : a-human
Score : 324 points
Date : 2021-03-16 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| hackererror404 wrote:
| The writing on the wall has been clear for years... China won't
| play nice. It's far past time Apple and every other serious tech
| player gets the heck out of China.
| freebuju wrote:
| For Apple that would be akin to committing suicide
| yorwba wrote:
| I wonder how that fits with the Ministry of Industry and
| Information Technology's recent notice to 136 companies to stop
| their excessive collection of user data by March 17 or cease
| operation:
| https://www.miit.gov.cn/xwdt/gxdt/sjdt/art/2021/art_7e5c3fa7...
|
| Maybe the kind of collection CAID enables is considered
| acceptable? Or it's just a case of different departments planning
| past each other.
| hackererror404 wrote:
| The writing on the wall has been clear for years. Apple and every
| other tech company that cares at all about privacy (should be any
| tech company) needs to get the heck out of China... We
| desperately need supply chain diversity.
| egypturnash wrote:
| So basically TikTok is saying "please take us off the app store"
| except the hard way. Apple still hasn't budged on Epic trying to
| get rid of their cut on all Fortnite Fun-Buxxx sales through iOS,
| what makes TikTok think announcing they are going to blatantly
| violate the spirit, and possibly the letter, of Apple's no-
| tracking rules isn't gonna result in their app getting pulled?
|
| I guess maybe they're hoping for a decision in the Apple-Epic
| trial that leaves Apple hurting? Looks like the trial's coming in
| May. And maybe Facebook's suing them over being forced to reveal
| how much tracking they do, too.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Well, having serious support in China (including from the CCCP)
| is one way. Epic wouldn't matter here since China is an
| extremely important market for Apple.
| hackererror404 wrote:
| not just an important market, an integral part of their
| supply chain. Without China, Apple wouldn't be able to make a
| single product as it stands today. China has all the power in
| that relationship.
| gridder wrote:
| Well said, this should be told more often.
| franklampard wrote:
| ccccp
| nativeimigrant wrote:
| ccccccccp
| newbie578 wrote:
| Would love to see Tim Apple address this issue, since he so loves
| privacy and the rules when Facebook and Epic are concerned..
| Majestic121 wrote:
| "Three people with knowledge of briefings between Apple and
| developers also said the Cupertino, California-based company
| would be wary of taking strong action, despite a clear violation
| of its stated rules, if CAID has the support of China's tech
| giants as well as its government agencies."
|
| That's chilling.
|
| I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy
| protection, even though I'm not an Apple user, but if even them
| bow down like this, I'm not sure which company would have the
| backbone to stand up to the CCP.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This hasn't played out yet. I'm curious who put this into
| multiple news streams this week. Apple doesn't want to
| unilaterally block TikTok for using a state-backed solution.
| But if Washington requires it to -\\_(tsu)_/-.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy
| protection
|
| The Apple privacy push is for Apple protecting your data from
| 3d parties. Apple still collects plenty of information by
| itself.
|
| From a consumer standpoint, there should be no difference if
| you care about privacy.
|
| If you really want control over your data, you need a rooted
| Android phone running a custom rom with no Google apps, and use
| something like Firefox Focus for web interfaces to all the apps
| that you use.
| kop316 wrote:
| > I tend to have a good opinion of Apple regarding privacy
| protection.
|
| From my understanding:
|
| https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/gcbd...
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
|
| If you are in mainland china, a state owned telco owns the keys
| and the data stored in iCloud, so you really don't have any
| privacy with Apple if you are in China. It more or less ruins
| my opinion of Apple's stance of privacy.
| akmarinov wrote:
| There's about 85.3 billion reasons a year for them to not stand
| up to the CCP and in the end Apple's interest in privacy is
| mostly a tool to differentiate its offerings from the
| competition so they can sell people stuff.
| imglorp wrote:
| It's a $2.2 trillion dollar company with $200 billion in
| cash. They can easily afford to do the right thing. If they
| offered a private device and said to all governments "take it
| or leave it" then those governments would answer only to
| their people if they banned the device.
|
| Of course, name one public corporation that would leave a
| little cash on the table, ever, to do the right thing.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Google completely pulled out of China and practically all
| their products are banned & blocked in China as a result.
| Although considering most people don't even mention it and
| are happy to excuse companies like Apple, it's more of an
| example of how utterly meaningless it is for a company to
| do something like this. I'm sure Google, Apple, and their
| competitors will never repeat this mistake again.
| kingaillas wrote:
| I think China has some extra leverage to deploy here: China
| can respond "We leave it. Oh, one more thing: our domestic
| market is off limits to you. Pray we don't alter the deal
| further by kicking your manufacturing out too."
| mrweasel wrote:
| Kicking out Apple manufactoring won't happen, because
| it's actually dangerous to Chinese manufactoring. Apple
| is currently one of the only companies who could deal
| with being banned in China. It won't be cheap or easy,
| but Apple could move manufactoring. They already have a
| deal with an Indian company who makes older iPhones for
| the indian market.
|
| Apple is also one of the few companies who can either
| absorb the additional cost or even pass it on to
| customers.
|
| But IF Apple was to move manufactoring it would set a
| dangerous precedence for other companies and potentially
| start a supply chain completely outside China.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Kicking out Apple manufactoring won't happen [...] it
| would set a dangerous precedence_
|
| Ah, but if you don't care about setting a public example,
| you can punish them in more subtle ways.
|
| The traditional trick in corrupt countries is to have a
| bunch rules that aren't enforced and everyone breaks all
| the time - then if the leaders decide they don't like you
| they just start enforcing the rules on you.
|
| A corrupt regime would simply announce they were shocked
| - shocked! - to find parts of Apple's Chinese supply
| chain had low environmental standards.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| You're assuming the shareholders would support such
| decision.
|
| Keep in mind there's a legal mandate for public traded
| companies to increase share holders value. It's grey-ish
| legal requirement but I don't think the executive
| management wants to risk the legal consequences of doing
| the right thing.
|
| Edit: it's shareholders and not stakeholders that matter.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You can make an argument that it increases shareholder
| value long term because if China increases human rights,
| it increases the shareholder value of the world in
| monetary terms because people will be better off.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Keep in mind there's a legal mandate for public traded
| companies to increase share holders value. It's grey-ish
| legal requirement but I don't think the executive
| management wants to risk the legal consequences of doing
| the right thing.
|
| What are the legal consequences? I keep reading about
| these mysterious laws that require management to maximize
| shareholder value or profits or whatnot, but I've never
| heard of a court punishing management for not doing so
| (never mind the fact that it's impossible to define and
| prove per legal standards).
| mrweasel wrote:
| If Apple was kicked out of China, leaving them with no
| Chinese manufacturing... ? In that case the shareholders
| have no option, it's either that or sell no new devices.
|
| If you mean that the shareholders would rather please the
| Chinese government, rather than risk getting kicked out
| of China, then yes, I think Apple would go a long way to
| not piss off China.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Exactly. Whether a major corporation technically could do
| "the right thing" at the expense of their own bottom line
| is a moot point, and it'd take a fundamental shift in our
| society for that to change. Rather, getting them to act in
| a way that's beneficial to as many people as possible is a
| matter of economic incentives and regulation.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| China is their bottom line when it comes to fab. If China kicks
| Apple out, we can expect 50k dollar iPhones soon thereafter.
| It's sad that China has outcompeted the western world, but it
| makes sense when you consider the fact that they engage in
| human rights abuses to do so.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If China kicks Apple out, we can expect 50k dollar iPhones
| soon thereafter_
|
| Do you really believe that people in India spend $50,000 on
| the iPhones that are made in India, or are you just being
| hyperbolic?
| tediousdemise wrote:
| It's just my pessimism about greedy American companies, who
| pass all costs onto the consumer without remorse.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That's called business. Entity A provides a product or
| service to entity B. The price entity B pays Entity A is
| greater than the price entity A pays to create the
| product or service.
|
| The alternative is Entity A being a charity.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I'm not sure its outcompeted in the traditional sense if
| production doesn't follow environmental standards and
| pollutes the world. We love to buy cheap stuff because once
| it ships over the pacific the pollution isn't our problem. At
| some point we will pay for cheap electronics from the asian
| world.
| CerealFounder wrote:
| Say it with me. You cant be a mature service economy AND an
| ultra cheap manufacturing economy. It's not said, its far
| more lucrative to to be the former than the latter. This is
| just an odd consequence that their investments are so
| concentrated in a single place. and that place is peak
| antithetical to fair economic fights.
| aroman wrote:
| > Say it with me. You cant be a mature service economy AND
| an ultra cheap manufacturing economy.
|
| What immutable law prevents this from being true?
| powerapple wrote:
| I don't think Apple should care about CAA. It is a private
| organization, although it may have ways to lobby the
| government, it is far from CCP's business. Of course, it has
| all the big companies' support, it might be a problem for
| Apple.
|
| Also I don't think Apple's policy would be a big problem for
| CAID. After all, you just need to ask your user's permission
| when loading your game, I am sure people will just click yes.
| If they don't, they are not your target user anyway.
|
| I hope Apple hold a strong stance on this. Previous Tencent
| refused to pay Apple 30% of payment made to authors on WeChat,
| they resolved it by Apple backing down by not asking for the
| cut for those payments. It was a big story for a while. Apple's
| decision would be based on market.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I am concerned about the claims that Apple will turn a blind eye
| to this, I hope it does not get wide usage.
|
| On a side note... it is stories like this that really make me
| hate being in the tech industry (yes I know that is a very large
| net to cast) sometimes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I sympathize with that sentiment. One of the few things I can
| tell myself is my role isn't involved in this side of things.
| The only thing that has helped from getting totally
| disillusioned is having hobbies that are not tech related.
| soheil wrote:
| This is a story because it's fashionable to hate on China. This
| has been going on in the US for years already. Using terms like
| CAID without an explanation to what it is makes the reader scared
| that China has somehow been able to infiltrate iOS to track
| users, this is bad journalism. CAID is a simple advertising id
| used across apps, there is no hacking of iOS or an incredible
| technical prowess on the the side of China that we should all be
| afraid of, etc.
|
| The term "state-backed" in the title should be removed, HN is not
| a political battleground.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >there is no hacking of iOS or an incredible technical prowess
| on the the side of China that we should all be afraid of, etc.
|
| Claiming China (or the US, UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.) does
| not have incredible technical prowess and hacking abilities is
| silly. Though if you're simply claiming this specific example
| is not evidence of that prowess, I'd agree. I also agree that
| US companies are doing very similar types of cyber stalking,
| but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it when we find
| other countries such as China doing it
| publicola1990 wrote:
| Indeed is Instagram or Snapchat doing possibly something
| similar?
| jug wrote:
| Good. So it sounds like it's no big deal if Apple blocks TikTok
| until the circumvention of App Store policy is resolved then.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| As much as I like Apple products, it looks like the privacy buck
| stops at China.
|
| The western world needs to desperately work on making their
| supply chains independent of the CCP, lest they'd like their
| supply chains to be poisoned at some point in the future.
|
| I'm a big fan of Purism and everything that they are doing. I
| hope their software and hardware matures with the same level of
| polish we've come to know and expect from Apple products, and
| will be an early investor if they ever decide to IPO.
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is what made me stop using Apple products altogether.
| Their privacy and security bit is all smoke and mirrors, and
| I'd much rather just directly understand what my privacy model
| looks like instead of trying to surmise what's going on through
| the other side of the frosted glass. Their compliance with
| China's Uighur roundup is despicable, and I don't trust them in
| the slightest to defend tech in the long-term. They're out to
| make money, which is why they're the most profitable business
| in the world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > They're out to make money, which is why they're the most
| profitable business in the world.
|
| Everyone I know is out to make money. Apple is the most
| profitable because they're selling something with high demand
| that people are willing and able to pay for.
| gfiorav wrote:
| You'll see how the west is going to "rebrand" globalization
| from the "world savior" to "a dependency issue". We're going
| back.
|
| Everyone thought that as new countries got richer, they would
| follow in the steps of western values (democracy, free markets,
| etc.). Yet, all we really achieved is to fund the CCP. And now
| they're not letting investors get their money out and they're
| putting military bases where they swore they would never.
| Great.
|
| Of course, the world is more "equal" in general, but not in the
| concrete edge cases. For already developed countries, it's a
| nightmare that destroyed the industry and the middle class. For
| developing countries, it's a nightmare where a powerful few
| (CCP) have more resources than ever to suppress their people
| and relinquish power.
|
| The only way forward is back. Let's keep the diversity and the
| share of information and progress. Let's reverse the economic
| dependency hell we've cornered ourselves into.
|
| P.D: I have nothing but sympathy for the Chinese people. I
| admire their resolve and creativity. I hate the CCP and how
| people all over the world have come to relativize even our core
| values as a society (democracy, freedom of speech, etc). We're
| really close to a middle-ages screw up if we don't remember
| what we stand for.
| api wrote:
| > Everyone thought that as new countries got richer, they
| would follow in the steps of western values (democracy, free
| markets, etc.).
|
| This is the key idea that has failed: the idea that
| prosperity equals or leads to social liberalism and human
| rights, or that the two are interdependent.
|
| This idea appears to be wrong, having been disproven by
| China.
|
| Totalitarianism and prosperity can co-exist just fine.
| Totalitarianism and capitalism can even co-exist to a degree,
| with the totalitarian tendency to kneecap the extremely
| wealthy being outweighed by the totalitarian ability to
| forcibly suppress workers' rights movements and pushes for
| higher wages. Totalitarians can also backstop the economy,
| stepping in in the event of a crash and forcing number to go
| up by edict. That benefits the investor class at the expense
| of the working class by effectively writing down wages and
| inflating assets.
|
| This means utilitarian arguments for freedom and human rights
| fail. That's a big deal and undermines at least a half
| century of libertarian and neoliberal talking points. It
| means human rights must be argued for on purely spiritual,
| moral/ethical, or hedonic grounds, not utilitarian grounds.
|
| I think the collapse of this key idea is as much a driver of
| the global push-back against globalism as working class
| economic concerns and cultural xenophobia, if not more. Human
| beings are philosophical beings and coherent narratives and
| ideas matter to us. When China showed that you could have
| totalitarianism and prosperity, the bottom fell out of the
| argument for the whole project.
| gfiorav wrote:
| Yes, pretty much agree. I'll say that in the end people
| want their freedom.
|
| I didn't believe this until the lockdown. Being told what
| to do is something that makes you instantly appreciate
| freedom.
|
| There will always be revolt, given enough time. CCP have
| outdone themselves in that department though. They've
| learnt from USSR and Cuba.
|
| In USSR/Cuba people know. They talk to outsiders and
| realize the don't live like they're better. China has
| learnt and told their citizens that they're bullied
| everywhere so the CCP was made to protect them. Genius
| really.
| api wrote:
| The CCP is also building a surveillance state that may
| allow them to preemptively shut down any dissent before
| it gains any traction and do so in real time. Unlike most
| Western states there isn't even a pretense of legal or
| constitutional restraint. They can surveil with total
| impunity and more importantly _use that data with total
| impunity_. Western governments are at least constrained
| on the second part if not the first.
|
| That is fucking scary. We have invented a set of
| technologies that could be used to create an un-
| overthrowable dictatorship and permanently enslave the
| human race... to get people to click ads.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| Do people want their freedom? For many people even today
| there's a strong desire for comfort, familiarity, duty,
| etc over freedom. We aren't allowed to urinate in public,
| even if we are careful to avoid making a mess, a health
| hazard, or to flash anyone - because we've deemed that
| freedom not worth the costs to comfort in walking your
| streets without people peeing in public. You can't own
| military grade artillery anymore, you can't curse on the
| radio, you can't work as a child, you can't purchase
| cigarettes under 18, you can't even legally drive or even
| prove your capable of driving safely before 16 (much less
| vote). There's plenty of freedoms we forgo for some
| degree of security and comfort, and we wanted a different
| balance of freedom, security, and comfort just a few
| years ago, or decades ago, and we'll likely want a
| different balance in 10 more years. Plenty of people in
| 2020 were totally fine with fines and enforced curfews in
| light of protests, riots, and pandemic. Freedom doesn't
| seem like a true north for humans
| tartoran wrote:
| It's a bit late for that. Not sure if it is too late though.
| Without changing a few essential philosophies such as
| consumerism the whole world is dependent on China's
| manufacture strength. Without scooping heavily into the
| resouces of the top 1% who benefited most from globalization
| this whole thing is also impossible to achieve. Without
| taxing the corporations a higher rate the middleclass won't
| be able to recover. I don't see anything being done about
| this.
| gfiorav wrote:
| Oh, it's super late! In the short term, China will
| definitely be the largest economy (it's just about
| demographics + GDP).
|
| The only thing that could challenge that is:
|
| 1) World war (please no)
|
| 2) China is chopped up (but that's why they crack down on
| Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc)
|
| So I think we might see another rebranding about what it
| means to be the n1 economy. Or they might come up with a
| new metric hehe.
|
| The fact of the matter is that China's rule won't last long
| because:
|
| 1) It's governed by a bunch of hand picked corrupt and
| ignorant bunch called the CCP (although they've done
| propaganda and brainwashing far better than the USSR, I'll
| give them that)
|
| 2) There's a demographic bomb incoming for China (not
| enough children).
| tartoran wrote:
| How about the top down governing approach that works in
| some situations and is a disaster in others? Currently
| favorable but times change.
|
| Second, we should not hope that an opponent does worse
| than us to make us look better but we should simply
| better ourselves in the first place. Currently I'm seeing
| only decline and disunity in the western civilization,
| very short term thinking and lack of vision, but I'm
| aware that's just a phase that is possible to flip
| anytime.
| jonathannat wrote:
| For those who wants to stop supporting China, don't lose hope.
| Supply chains are migrating, due to tariffs, sanctions, and
| hatred towards CCP. Don't let naysayers who may have a vested
| interest in China talk you down. Just keep checking where the
| product you are buying is coming from.
|
| - check https://chinalawblog.com and you will see that
| companies are indeed moving out of China at a quick pace. In
| fact, the site advocates that you do not think of China as the
| default manufacturing...
|
| - most citizens in other countries hates China now.
| https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-
| vi.... this dictates shifting consumer behavior (more and more
| people will choose items made not in China). US citizens has a
| 20% favorable view of China.
| https://thehill.com/homenews/news/543354-view-of-china-as-gr...
|
| - No one wants to go to China right now. If you want to go, you
| are subjected to an anal swab covid test, mandatory spyware on
| your phone, plus visa incentive that requires you to use their
| state covid vaccine (50% efficacy!). Not to mention foreigner
| kidnappings and disbar from leaving the country. No company in
| their right mind would send their staff to China to increase
| footprint there
|
| - from footwear
| https://footwearnews.com/2021/business/trade/us-footwear-
| imp..., to furniture
| https://www.furnituretoday.com/opinion/sourcing-strategies/b...
| to electronics https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsungs-shift-
| away-from-china-..., there's a steady pace of companies (big
| and small) moving out of china
| [deleted]
| topspin wrote:
| > The western world needs to desperately work on making their
| supply chains independent of the CCP
|
| The western world can't. The world is only so big and the
| remaining sites of refuge for cheap, exploitable labor and
| Potemkin regulatory regimes are few. Almost any alternative
| place you might cite is either already beholden to China (the
| viable parts of Africa) or too unstable (due to endemic
| corruption, external threats, etc.) to risk.
|
| Insourcing is obviously out of the question; the wealthy
| Western establishment is violently intolerant of industrial
| expansion.
| jonathannat wrote:
| > The western world can't.
|
| I'm not sure if you've been paying attention, but supply
| chains have been moving to
| Vietnam/Malaysia/Indonesia/India/Mexico for the last few
| years, and the trend is only increasing.
|
| There's literally a growing military alliance (US, India,
| Australia, Japan) against China right now. Also not to
| mention other countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US)
| actively incentivizing their companies to onshore or move out
| of China. And because South China Sea is crucial to the
| growth of SE Asian economies, now France/UK/Germany along
| with Japan/US have warships sailing there to stop China's
| expansion.
|
| So yes, the western world can.
| fossuser wrote:
| Agreed - I suspect Apple (and others) are doing this as
| fast as they can to de-risk.
|
| They can't blow up their existing relationships in the mean
| time, but they _can_ blow them up once they have another
| option in place. At the very least, they 'll have more
| leverage in negotiation.
| nomel wrote:
| It appears that Apple is part of that trend:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-vietnam-apple-
| exc...
| jonathannat wrote:
| Incomplete list of companies moving out of China.
|
| Adidas & Lacoste: https://www.glossy.co/fashion/lacoste-
| and-adidas-pledge-to-c...
|
| Nike: https://www.gq.com/story/nike-adidas-shifting-
| production-asi...
|
| Hasbro: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/hasbro-to-cut-
| china-producti...
|
| Samsung: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-
| china/samsun...
|
| GoPro: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/10/gopro-is-moving-
| camera-produ...
|
| LG Electronics: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/artic
| leView.html?idxno=5...
|
| Sharp: https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/02/out-of-china/
|
| Hyundai: https://tfipost.com/2020/04/big-hyundai-steel-
| and-several-ot...
|
| Nintendo: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2019
| /07/09/ninten...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Insourcing is obviously out of the question; the wealthy
| Western establishment is violently intolerant of industrial
| expansion.
|
| As far as I can tell, it's simply more expensive to insource,
| taking into account wages, labor regulations, and
| environmental regulations. If and when other countries catch
| up to the production costs in the US, then there won't be a
| reason to ship things halfway around the world.
| pydry wrote:
| It's frequently not cheaper and occasionally more
| expensive. One reason it is popular is that it gives the
| managers who oversee it a lot more power and control:
|
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/more-on-the-myth-
| of-...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Managers can't force people to buy products based on how
| they like power and control. They either deliver an
| acceptable price to value ratio, or people buy something
| else.
|
| I couldn't figure out what point the article you linked
| to was trying to make, but the fact that pretty much
| everything you buy is not stamped with "Made in USA"
| means that the cost to make it in the US was higher than
| elsewhere, and presumably people would choose to not buy
| it.
|
| It wasn't because there was a manager's convention and
| they all agreed to send the work abroad so they could
| have more power and control. It's because if they didn't,
| their competitor would have, and Walmart would have
| chosen to put that cheaper product on their shelves
| rather than yours.
| pydry wrote:
| Products low on the value chain that are unskilled-labor
| intensive are almost universally cheaper abroad. It
| wouldn't make economic sense to make t shirts in the US
| unless consumers paid a premium.
|
| Products high up on the value chain - the kind you don't
| dress up in your best slacks to go and buy at Walmart are
| a different story, however.
|
| I can count several software projects that were
| outsourced off the top of my head that were ostensibly
| done for cost savings purposes and were utter disasters.
| These disasters are routinely covered up and bullshitted,
| too.
|
| This has at the same time not dampened the appetite for
| outsourcing software much. Coordination (i.e. management)
| costs are higher. Consulting companies can bill millions
| for these projects.
|
| This is the point the article was making - pretty
| cogently.
|
| It's less of a smoke-filled room conspiracy and more of a
| mundane "conspiracy" to shape the supply/demand curve.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| Or, if the parent is correct, the rest of the world will
| never catch up - because the US will keep adding
| regulations to keep itself more expensive.
| CountSessine wrote:
| Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-
| defeating. Success breeds complacency and labor unrest. This
| isn't just a China-thing (I have no idea what your Potemkin
| regulation is or why you would mix those metaphors).
|
| When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they
| think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and
| start a union to parasitize earnings.
|
| When Asians (including the Japanese and Koreans) see an
| absurdly profitably company, they think, "why are they able
| to charge such high prices???!" and they kneecap the
| company's ability to exploit their market.
|
| It's an important difference for manufacturing physical
| things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in
| manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. It's defective
| wetware in our heads and how we think about wealth and
| creating value, so don't expect manufacturing supply chains
| to return to Western countries any time soon.
| tw04 wrote:
| >When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they
| think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and
| start a union to parasitize earnings.
|
| Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is
| "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim.
|
| >It's an important difference for manufacturing physical
| things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in
| manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech.
|
| The West lost out to Asia because their standard of living
| was so much lower that it was basically slave labor for a
| decade. You apparently have missed out on the repeated
| protests at factories across China with their workers
| demanding better working conditions and wages.
|
| Expecting to be able to be able to do something more than
| just not starve to death isn't a western ideal, it's a
| human ideal. When the company you work for is printing
| money and you're living in poverty, something eventually
| gives. As has happened at literally every point in human
| history to date. Sometimes through violence, sometimes
| through government intervention. But the "unwashed masses"
| won't stay ignorant forever.
| CountSessine wrote:
| _Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is
| "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim._
|
| More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the
| only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their
| housing market was undermining living standards in the
| late 90's, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing
| and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing
| market almost immediately corrected itself and housing
| prices in suburban Tokyo have been in free-fall ever
| since. You can get a 2000sqft family home for the
| equivalent of about 200k just 30 minutes outside downtown
| Tokyo today. We don't do that because... why?
|
| _The West lost out to Asia because..._
|
| Again, more defective wetware. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan
| - these are democratic states with a high standard of
| living that have been able to control costs in ways that
| the West hasn't. More people are homeless in the US per
| capita than any of those countries and it has everything
| to do with defective programming and talk of "liveable
| wages". Of course everyone needs to be able to afford to
| live. But your own mistaken assumptions are emblematic of
| the political and social dysfunction of the West. Until
| we address that, no - those supply chains won't be
| returning.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| We're not dropping prices in NA in good part because our
| governments are dysfunctional and don't want to
| intervene, and because large landowners see such
| interventions as contrary to their benefit.
|
| And besides, relaxing zoning is far from enough - you
| need to build vast and performant public transit systems,
| and in the case of Tokyo you need to make housing a
| depreciating asset.
|
| South Korea was not a democratic state during most of its
| crucial growth period either - it was only after a
| revolution in the 80s, and even then democracy is a very
| gracious word for a country that was literally ruled by a
| cult for half a decade.
|
| Taiwan also was in quasi-dictatorial KMT rule for most of
| its rise, and Japan to this day on the national level is
| basically ruled by the LDP in perpetuity.
|
| But crucially, Japan, SK and Taiwan aren't where the kind
| of production China does happens. They are just as
| economically beholden to China as we are, sometimes
| moreso.
| CountSessine wrote:
| _We 're not dropping prices in NA in good part because
| our governments are dysfunctional and don't want to
| intervene, and because large landowners see such
| interventions as contrary to their benefit. And besides,
| relaxing zoning is far from enough - you need to build
| vast and performant public transit systems, and in the
| case of Tokyo you need to make housing a depreciating
| asset._
|
| Yes - and as I said, this is the defective programming in
| minds of Westerners. The government does what we tell
| them to do and most people want this. It's everywhere -
| it's the entitlement to a suburban home and the
| subordination of all other interests, even the concept of
| personal property, in service to this. The fact that the
| media doesn't discuss these things in spite of the fact
| that smart people like Warren and others write about it
| is evidence of the bad programming.
|
| _South Korea was not a democratic state during most of
| its crucial growth period either - it was only after a
| revolution in the 80s, and even then democracy is a very
| gracious word for a country that was literally ruled by a
| cult for half a decade.
|
| Taiwan also was in quasi-dictatorial KMT rule for most of
| its rise, and Japan to this day on the national level is
| basically ruled by the LDP in perpetuity._
|
| Is it your contention that these countries aren't
| democratic and prosperous today? Is that your claim? Is
| your claim that their citizens live in near slavery, as
| the previous poster's was?
|
| _But crucially, Japan, SK and Taiwan aren 't where the
| kind of production China does happens. They are just as
| economically beholden to China as we are, sometimes
| moreso._
|
| The company that I worked at previously had to assess
| manufacturing alternatives to China in the wake of
| Trump's tariffs. Most of the parts on the BOM could
| reasonably be sourced by other Asian countries like those
| three at a small premium. US manufacturers either weren't
| available or were completely priced out. If the West
| could even just get their manufacturing costs in parity
| with those three - TW, SK, and JP - that in itself would
| be huge progress.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Japan, SK, and Taiwan, were not democratic when they were
| manufacturing behemoths, yes.
|
| For reference, the US has roughly twice the manufacturing
| output of Japan.
|
| The idea that manufacturing boomed there because the
| workers were almost slaves is fairly accurate.
| [deleted]
| jquery wrote:
| You're making a lot of bold claims. It would be nice if
| you justified at least one of them before chaining them
| together to reach a pre-ordained conclusion.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Nice name
| tw04 wrote:
| >More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay
| the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that
| their housing market was undermining living standards in
| the late 90's, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took
| housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The
| housing market almost immediately corrected itself and
| housing prices in suburban Tokyo have been in free-fall
| ever since. You can get a 2000sqft family home for the
| equivalent of about 200k just 30 minutes outside downtown
| Tokyo today. We don't do that because... why?
|
| The world does exist outside of Silicon Valley. I can get
| exactly what you're describing in over half of this
| country, pick your state including the entirety of the
| midwest.
|
| >Again, more defective wetware. Japan, South Korea,
| Taiwan - these are democratic states with a high standard
| of living that have been able to control costs in ways
| that the West hasn't. More people are homeless in the US
| per capita than any of those countries and it has
| everything to do with defective programming and talk of
| "liveable wages". Of course everyone needs to be able to
| afford to live. But your own mistaken assumptions are
| emblematic of the political and social dysfunction of the
| West. Until we address that, no - those supply chains
| won't be returning.
|
| The median income in South Korea is $3,000 less than the
| US. And they have universal healthcare.
|
| Someone's wetware is defective, it isn't mine. You might
| want to do some research before showing up with that kind
| of condescending attitude.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/median-in...
| elmomle wrote:
| >The world does exist outside of Silicon Valley. I can
| get exactly what you're describing in over half of this
| country, pick your state including the entirety of the
| midwest.
|
| This is equivalent to saying sky-high housing prices in
| Tokyo didn't need fixing, since folks could always just
| live in Hokkaido--a pragmatic absurdity.
|
| A city is a giant organism that needs people to play a
| variety of roles in order to thrive. All those people
| deserve (and arguably, for the health of the city, need)
| to be able to earn enough to live with some dignity. If
| only the wealthy can afford decent housing near a city,
| that city is no longer a functional community--it's a
| NIMBY bubble that creates a feedback loop of
| socioeconomic disparity.
| tw04 wrote:
| >This is equivalent to saying sky-high housing prices in
| Tokyo didn't need fixing, since folks could always just
| live in Hokkaido--a pragmatic absurdity.
|
| It isn't even remotely the equivalent of saying that. The
| land mass of Japan is a fraction of the US, and the jobs
| are highly concentrated in their large cities. The US, as
| a whole, is nothing like that.
|
| Regardless, it was a pointless argument for him to make
| in the first place, he was just moving goal posts by
| trying to equate calling employees parasites to San
| Francisco zoning laws. There was absolutely no point
| going down that path other than to distract from his
| original (disgusting) statement and implying that somehow
| people wanting more than minimum wage should really be
| blaming the Mayor of San Francisco for high housing
| prices. Which again... is completely irrelevant to the
| vast majority of the population of the US.
| CountSessine wrote:
| _It isn 't even remotely the equivalent of saying that.
| The land mass of Japan is a fraction of the US, and the
| jobs are highly concentrated in their large cities. The
| US, as a whole, is nothing like that._
|
| Most US industrial production is concentrated in about 5
| regions. The US isn't _that_ different.
|
| _Regardless, it was a pointless argument for him to make
| in the first place, he was just moving goal posts by
| trying to equate calling employees parasites to San
| Francisco zoning laws_
|
| Nonsense. Housing costs are the great misery-multiplier
| in the West and it isn't specific to SF. Look at Berlin
| or London or Paris or Toronto. Everywhere the dysfunction
| is the same and everywhere the working poor live with
| crushing housing insecurity, in spite of living in
| thriving job markets. With reasonable urban housing
| prices and rent most of the people in the "working poor"
| would advance to middle-class status and a lot of the
| inequality issues we have would be tractable. Instead, we
| just keep ignoring pricing theory and we just keep
| dumping more wealth into supply-constrained markets and
| we just keep wondering why these problems don't get any
| better.
|
| _There was absolutely no point going down that path
| other than to distract from his original (disgusting)
| statement and implying that somehow people wanting more
| than minimum wage_
|
| Ptooey! Pardon me, but I had to spit out all of the words
| you're stuffing in my mouth. I said nothing about minimum
| wage. You did. This is the same neurotic defective
| programming I'm talking about. The projection of intent
| in your response is what's disgusting.
|
| _Which again... is completely irrelevant to the vast
| majority of the population of the US._
|
| Go look up what a lower-middle class family needs to pay
| for rent in suburbs in Atlanta or Austin or other cities
| with good job opportunities.
| elteto wrote:
| > ... start a union to parasitize earnings.
|
| Yes, those pesky employees should just STFU and be thankful
| for the scraps.
| CountSessine wrote:
| Again - the fact that you can't see both sides of the
| equation is why we don't make things anymore.
| majormajor wrote:
| Terms like "parasitize earnings" don't sound like seeing
| both sides of the equation. Why's your anger and blame
| focused _there_ for not seeing both sides?
|
| The people who outsourced things weren't simply trying to
| reduce gains made by unions, they were looking at price
| differences that could not exist in the US due to cost
| and standard of living. They certainly weren't looking at
| both sides of this in terms of long term effect either!
| CountSessine wrote:
| _Terms like "parasitize earnings" don't sound like seeing
| both sides of the equation_
|
| I don't want employees to get those earnings. I don't
| want investors or shareholders to get them either. I want
| consumers to get lower prices.
|
| _they were looking at price differences that could not
| exist in the US due to cost and standard of living_
|
| Again, what does that mean, "standard of living"? That we
| indulge industrial labor monopolies and pay more for
| manufactured goods than we need or want to like the 60's?
| How do you feel about paying $5000 for that computer? Or
| that we reward landlords and enrich landowners for
| participating in the creation of dysfunctional
| regulations?
|
| I agree - Western industrialists have been able to play
| both sides of the equation - outsourcing production to
| places where industrial cost-control is effective and
| selling in to markets where there's a large upper-middle
| class of well-compensated credentialed professionals like
| us and entitled land-owners.
|
| But I don't think that the solution is to give more power
| to industrial labor unions. My own pet solution is German
| worker councils - if only because they empower workers
| and make managers and industrialists accountable to
| employee needs, but at the same time can't coordinate
| labor demands across an industry. Managers can't ignore
| employee welfare but also employees can't gang up on
| consumers. But no one else wants this - industrialists
| hate the idea of inviting unions in to C-level planning
| and unions at their core want labor monopolies.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Again, what does that mean, "standard of living"? That
| we indulge industrial labor monopolies and pay more for
| manufactured goods than we need or want to like the 60's?
| How do you feel about paying $5000 for that computer? Or
| that we reward landlords and enrich landowners for
| participating in the creation of dysfunctional
| regulations?
|
| It means something very plain: nobody in the US would
| have accepted those wages to prevent profit-based
| outsourcing. So it wasn't a question of union parasites
| forcing people overseas, it just was something that would
| not have worked, structurally.
|
| Consumers getting lower prices forever and ever is a
| single-dimension focus, like you otherwise seem to be
| decrying, since you're not answering any of the other
| questions there about how to prevent profiteering or
| powerful wealthy people from playing both sides. You're
| looking at just one side but proclaiming it as a secret
| insight that is the only way to move forward. I don't
| think worker councils would've done anything to let US
| production and labor prices compete with offshore labor
| prices in the past 50 years... if you can make t-shirts
| cheaper by stripping those labor costs to the bone, but
| the cost of everything else those workers need is
| untouched, how will it fix it?
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately
| self-defeating._
|
| It's much more to do with the steadily increasing
| complexity of products due to humanity having become very
| much a global species with heavy interdependence.
|
| Look around the room you are sitting in: There will be
| items in it manufactured all over the world, from
| components also coming from all over the world.
|
| That's not only how we manage to make these things so
| affordable, that's how we got them at this scale and
| complexity in the very first place.
|
| The idea that a single country could emulate that, in
| complete isolation, is bluntly said childish. Isolationism
| like that doesn't lead to progress or innovation, it leads
| to North Korea style impoverished hermit kingdoms.
|
| It's mind-boggling how few people seem to understand this
| reality in the year 2021, we are so interconnected that we
| can instantly communicate with somebody on the other side
| of the planet by just pulling a small device out of our
| pocket, it's considered the most normal thing in the world.
|
| Instead we get shortsighted and small-minded nationalist
| blowback in the form of Brexit and "America first!"
| politics.
|
| Even with the EU showing that economic cooperation and
| integration is one of the best and most constructive ways
| to ensure peace, stability and prosperity, particularly vs
| the alternative of alienation and vilification of whole
| nation states and their people as "enemies" that need to be
| fought in every way possible.
| crmd wrote:
| >> Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately
| self-defeating.
|
| > The idea that a single country could emulate that, in
| complete isolation, is bluntly said childish.
|
| Who is this "single country" straw man you are referring
| to? The western world is comprised of 50+ nations with
| over $40 trillion in GDP.
| freeflight wrote:
| And these 50+ nations have their very own industries that
| grew out of a demand for them to the scale of the demand
| for them with interdependence reaching all the way into
| Chinese tech manufacturing.
|
| If you retool all of that to suddenly do something else,
| than you will be missing something else.
|
| Because it's not like these 50+ nations with over $40
| trillion in GDP are just sitting there and wondering what
| to do with all of that productivity, they are already
| plenty busy doing those things that got them all that
| GDP, the things they are good at.
|
| That's why it's not really a "straw man", as the original
| argument implies globalized supply chains that emerged
| out of a given supply&demand could be artificially
| transplanted and rebuild in "the West", however that's
| even defined, to somehow reverse the reality of
| globalization.
| topspin wrote:
| > That's why it's not really a "straw man",
|
| Except that it is a straw man. This "childish" nation
| that seeks to thrive with no foreign trade ("in complete
| isolation") is a fiction inside your head that you're
| sharing as a target for your argument. It doesn't exist
| except as a straw man.
| topspin wrote:
| > I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is
|
| Nations such as China erect fig leaf regulatory regimes
| that are both ineffective and corrupt and are designed to
| attract Western capital that are avoiding the regulatory
| burdens (environmental regulation, labor regulation, etc.)
| in Western nations. These are Potemkin structures in that
| they offer plausibly deniable cover to the Western
| establishment for the purposes of trade agreements and
| other international instruments.
| coliveira wrote:
| You're right, except that it is not unionized workers
| parasitizing profits (unions are decreasing in numbers
| everywhere), it is shareholders parasitizing companies to
| extract whatever value they can. This is the big
| difference. In Asia, shareholders don't have the power to
| parasitize profits, and they allow ample competition
| between manufacturers. See, for example, the absurd
| situation of Apple. Americans think it is nice to have a
| single company nearly monopolizing device production, as if
| it were their right. In Asia people would have already
| started hundreds of companies to fight their monopolistic
| advantage (as they currently have in China).
| jeofken wrote:
| The pine phone is afaik built around a pretty off-the-shelves
| system-on-a-chip and made in China, exported with a Hong Kong
| company. Sadly a SOC far from what you'd get in a smartphone by
| Samsung or Apple, as they can swing with much larger wallets.
| If anyone knows the specific SOC version I'd appreciate the
| product ID
| Shadonototro wrote:
| china, usa, i see no differences
|
| different words, but same techniques
| hertzrat wrote:
| The article doesn't really talk about supply chain constraints.
| It talks more about the threat of losing market access
| coliveira wrote:
| Americans need to realize that, outside the US, nobody really
| cares anymore about the trope "China is tracking mobile apps".
| The reason is that everyone knows that US agencies are already
| doing this (remember Snowden?). So non-US customers feel that
| is just fine for competition if other countries can provide
| them with technology, even with the downside of the sporadic
| spying thing. It basically is better to have competition than
| being in the hands of a single superpower which, as Donald
| Trump has shown, can easily become out of control.
|
| By the way, nothing was better for China than the big show
| provided by Trump and his minions in the US during the last
| four years. It showed that nobody can trust 100% on the US to
| uphold democratic values.
| schiang wrote:
| China doesn't just provide supply chain anymore. They are also
| a huge market now because of its growing middle class. China
| has money to spend and US companies need to tap into that
| market.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| They're also now the market that all movies must target in
| order to be successful.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They 're also now the market that all movies must target
| in order to be successful._
|
| It depends on your definition of "successful."
|
| You can have a successful movie and not distribute it in
| China. It won't make the absolute maximum number of dollars
| possible on planet Earth, but it can still be a successful
| movie.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > You can have a successful movie and not distribute it
| in China. It won't make the absolute maximum number of
| dollars possible on planet Earth, but it can still be a
| successful movie.
|
| The business success or failure of a movie is entirely
| determined by how much money it makes. To maximize that
| success (or even to be considered a success), you must
| publish in China.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The business success or failure of a movie is entirely
| determined by how much money it makes_
|
| Even without your movement of goalposts, a movie can
| still be successful without being in China.
|
| The most successful movies in history were released, and
| massively profitable, before China's market opened to the
| rest of the world.
|
| _To maximize that success (or even to be considered a
| success), you must publish in China._
|
| This is simply false. There are plenty of successful
| businesses, movies, video games, and other enterprises
| that never touch China. I hate to break it to you, but
| China is a non-factor for the vast majority of businesses
| on the planet.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _China has money to spend and US companies need to tap into
| that market._
|
| "Choose to" tap into that market. No company "needs" to be in
| China.
|
| Just like there are thousands of companies in Europe that do
| not do business in the United States, and thousands of
| companies in Brazil that do not do business in Russia.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is conceivable in a winner take all business, or a top 2
| take all business, you either tap into the world's largest
| market or you don't survive.
|
| For example, Apple being able to lock up all the supply of
| higher end chips and smaller companies not being able to
| compete.
| Clubber wrote:
| >It is conceivable in a winner take all business, or a
| top 2 take all business, you either tap into the world's
| largest market or you don't survive.
|
| The US is the world's largest market, by a lot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_ma
| rke...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, I meant the world's top markets. Especially one
| that's up and coming.
| [deleted]
| coliveira wrote:
| And how big are these European or Brazilian companies?
| That's all fine if the US wants to become a 3rd tier
| economy. But if the country wants to expand, it has to
| trade with China.
| dalbasal wrote:
| You're getting kind of semantic. Theoretically, No company
| "needs" to be in business at all.
|
| If Chinese consumer market growth continues as it has been,
| it may the biggest market for Apple. Hard to be the largest
| luxury goods company in the world without the largest
| luxury goods market...
|
| OP is right. This gives China influence. Supply chain
| influence is a minor thing, relative to " _I 'm your
| biggest customer_" influence.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Why I don't like the "needs to" framing, especially as it
| comes to business decisions, is that I think it takes the
| agency out of the process. Too many of my friends and
| family seem to assume that just because there are
| customers willing to pay or cheaper labor, a company must
| automatically do a certain thing unless the government
| makes a law to prevent them from doing it.
|
| I guess that's why I like the "chooses to" framing
| because it highlights that leaders of companies can
| choose to not pursue markets or go with higher priced
| suppliers if they can make the argument as to how it
| might help them in the long term.
|
| Edit: typo
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK if the philosophy of it matters all that much. Apple
| is, likely, going to grow in China. We don't have to
| solve the "agency question" to know this.
|
| That said, I think there is a decent amount of
| determinism at play here. It's like the "why are all
| politicians such politicians?" problem. The companies
| with an interest in entering the Chinese market will,
| mostly, do it. It's predictable. Predictable isn't
| determinism, but it's en route.
|
| For a more poetic take, I'll paraphrase leonard cohen on
| "do you believe in free will?":
|
| _I think free will exists, but I think it 's over-rated.
| Mostly, we act because we are compelled to._
| kukx wrote:
| Well, let's merge both narrations: they need to, if they
| choose to pursue the leadership in the global market ;)
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| at the detriment of human rights and the environment.
|
| A lot of investors and pension funds are starting to add
| more criteria to their investments than just a profit.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| How do you avoid a situation where companies making
| ethical choices are bought or outspent by companies (or
| in fact by shareholders) that got rich by exploiting
| every profitable opportunity that is legally available to
| them, including unethical ones?
|
| From the point of view of any particular company the
| choice you're talking about may well exist, especially
| where the company is founder-led. But that doesn't mean
| the outcome you're hoping for can be achieved on a purely
| voluntary basis.
|
| It may work in exceptional cases though, Apple being one
| of them.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It is a pretty powerful combo: controlling supply and
| demand.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I would consider businesses providing for our basic human
| needs (eg food) to be needed to be in business.
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| They can choose for a year or two, but they will lose on
| scale. Apple can pull off their own processor because they
| are big enough. If companies don't sell in China, only
| Chinese companies are big enough to have fancy new
| components and production processes.
| adrr wrote:
| China consumer market is bigger than than the US. It will
| be for public companies to justify they they won't sell in
| China to their stockholders outside of IP theft and PR
| issues.
| ng12 wrote:
| Is there a good reason why we shouldn't sanction China like
| we do Russia, NK, and Iran? There's plenty of money to be
| made in those countries too.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| There are US sanctions on China.
|
| There is however a huge problem with sanctions: you need to
| have a _realistic_ plan for what you want to accomplish
| with your sanctions, or else it does little more than
| adding some friction to trade.
|
| That means that if you want to actually change the
| behaviour of a nation using sanctions, you need to have
| modest goals, an acceptance of compromise, and a readiness
| to let the other side come out looking like a respectable
| partner. These are basically things the US cannot muster in
| the relationship with Iran and North Korea, and the
| American violation of the JCPOA has significantly eroded US
| ability to persuade other countries to impose their own
| sanction.
|
| For China and Russia, the US alone cannot impose any
| important amount of sanctions and have them be upheld by
| third parties, the USA trying to block all imports from
| China would just mean the rest of the world needs to switch
| to using Yuan or Euros because that volume of trade simply
| cannot be replaced.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > There's plenty of money to be made in those countries
| too.
|
| Russia GDP: ~1.7 trillion
|
| Iran GDP: ~0.45 trillion
|
| North Korea GDP: ~0.028 trillion
|
| Meanwhile, China GDP: ~14.34 trillion
| macintux wrote:
| One reason, good or not depending on your views, is that
| China's GDP is 10x Russia's, 20x Iran's, and 1000x North
| Korea's (and I have to suspect that's generous towards NK).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nom
| i...
| jonathannat wrote:
| US has started to, with sanctions on xinjiang related
| companies, with sanctions on chinese officials over hong
| kong.
|
| It's just a matter of time before more sanctions arrive.
| Because dictatorships are short-sighted and incapable of
| change. So let's say China tries to prod Taiwan with some
| military approach and fails. Or escalation of border war
| with India or Vietnam or Japan. Or increasing purchases or
| Iranian goods.
|
| When there's a mini-war started by China in Asia, you will
| see a full worldwide sanction on China.
| gfiorav wrote:
| Yes. Never forget how the US seemingly thought that its
| companies, unchecked, would defend the national interests. We
| should all learn from this.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Apple has a $2T market cap. Do they truly "need" China? I
| know, I know, they have a responsibility to their
| shareholders, blah blah. But Two Trillion Dollars.
| aembleton wrote:
| They'll be worth a lot less than $2T if they exit from
| China.
| [deleted]
| schiang wrote:
| How do you think they got to $2T market cap in the first
| place?
| williesleg wrote:
| China is my hero! Go China! Why have Just Apple tracking us?
| drngxn wrote:
| Can someone explain technically how CAID works? Or point me to
| some articles/documentation?
| russli1993 wrote:
| 1. People outside doesn't understand how Chinese government
| works. This CAID is a project by advertising association, yes it
| is state backed. But these associations in China are commercial
| only and looks out to commercial interests.
|
| In western public opinion, "state-backed" has negative
| connotations and government is a necessary evil. But in Chinese
| political philosophy that is not the case. Government has a
| positive role. Government can unite groups, form common interest,
| work across conflicting interests to create a win-win situation
| for everyone. In China, in a lot of situations people actual seek
| leadership from the government to create standards or common
| approaches. A lot of the industrial policies documents people
| outside have a problem with are actually demanded by private
| parties, and government is just answering their demands.
|
| In this case it looks like the industry is driven by commercial
| interests to develop this technical solution. If the Chinese
| government wants to impose this kind of tracking to track
| people's activities online, it will need to use its executive
| power. And that involves the following steps: 1. Chinese central
| government announces direction to create this kind of tracking
| system. 2. Departments in state counsel start draft <<Guan Li
| Tiao Li >> and releases it public solicitation 3. <<Guan Li Tiao
| Li >> goes into effect 4. national people's congress drafting and
| passing laws. All of these will involve public disclosure. But
| there is no sign of any of this from the government.
|
| People can debate whether the tracking involved here is okay or
| not. But there is no sign here saying the government is designing
| this and mandating it in order to track people.
|
| Also Apple could try to close the "loophole" used here. Maybe the
| Chinese advertising industry will get pissed and demand the
| government to do something. But I doubt any legal actions will be
| taken. First, legally Apple doesn't break any Chinese laws.
| Second, Chinese government needs to be law abiding and rule based
| to attract foreign investments, which is crucial to the economy.
|
| 2. This article is accusing Tiktok of implementing this. But this
| is a project under discussion within China, likely only to be
| used within China, and Bytedance's apps in China, like douyin.
| Tiktok and Douyin are separate apps, run by separate management.
| TikTok by TikTok US, while Bytedance China runs all Chinese
| related business. The parent Bytedance is incorporated in Cayman
| islands. Hence Chinese laws do not apply to the parent and TikTok
| US. TikTok US is ought to follow US laws, customs, expectations
| and values. Of course its fine to pressure TikTok and Bytedance
| to not implement this in China as well. But this article's tone
| is implying Chinese government controls these entities and trying
| to track people everywhere. That is simply not true. The
| government 1) is not pushing to do so 2) doesn't have the means
| to do it. Even if Chinese government is tries to force Bytedance
| to share tiktok data, Bytedance can refuse, what can it do? It
| could only arrest Bytedance management or fine the company. Is
| there any of that happening? I am seeing a lot of anti-china ccp
| videos on TikTok. Just because the company is founded by a
| Chinese person doesn't mean it will be political and abide by the
| rules in china.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| It's additionally concerning that the US has little exposure to
| China-sourced data. This imbalance where the CCP knows far more
| about the average American than the US knows about the average
| Chinese person is deeply concerning. The more that is known, the
| larger the training data set, the more people can be influenced
| in ways that suit an openly hostile[0] government.
|
| [0] https://www.state.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/11/20-02832-El...
| danShumway wrote:
| So, what is CAID? How does it work?
|
| Is it a composite fingerprint based on how the device works, or
| an alternate ID that Apple isn't restricting yet? Would be nice
| to get some details about what exactly TikTok plans to do beyond
| "they found a way to get around it".
|
| Or is that information just not available yet? I can't find
| anything online detailing what the attack is.
| seniorgarcia wrote:
| I don't think there are any details on the implementation out
| yet.
|
| Judging by this article https://www.sohu.com/a/415394669_344262
| (in Chinese) the company behind CAID is https://www.reyun.com/.
| Pretty hard to find info on them and their product in englisch
| though. The only quick result I got was this:
| https://bloomgamer.com/2020/10/reyun-data-completed-its-c-ro...
| DLay wrote:
| CAID spec:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210316035745/docs.trackingio.c.
| ..
| anon9001 wrote:
| It appears to be like branch.io, firebase, or the facebook SDK
| but for Chinese ad companies.
|
| Here's a breakdown the changes in iOS 14 that likely caused
| this:
|
| * https://blog.branch.io/attribution-ios-14-survive-if-you-
| mis...
|
| * https://blog.branch.io/attribution-ios-14-cannot-wait-any-
| lo...
| mokash wrote:
| I will repost a comment I made about Apple and China in another
| post like 1.5 years ago:
|
| "Apple are beholden to China. Sure, China is a huge market for
| them but I think the bigger issue is manufacturing: if they piss
| China off they won't have anything to sell, anywhere! I'm sure
| Apple execs know this and I hope they're quickly planning to
| reduce, if not remove this dependency."
| dylan604 wrote:
| And how has that planning been going in those 18 months?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Presumably that is something Apple will keep a closely-
| guarded secret, even more so than usual.
| jhayward wrote:
| https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_to_move_production_from_china.
| ..
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-vietnam-apple-
| exc...
| mgreg wrote:
| Apple will soon start flagship iPhone 12 production on
| Indian soil for local customers, the company said on
| Tuesday
|
| Apple supplier Wistron recently began trial production of
| the iPhone 12 at a new facility near Bengaluru, with full
| production set to begin soon. The iPhone 12 will be the
| seventh iPhone model to be manufactured in India, but the
| first high-end device to do so.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/09/apple-
| iphone-12-product...
| poisonborz wrote:
| It's not that simple. China doing such a drastic step would
| make every industry flee instantly. Lots of companies already
| do transfer tasks to India and Vietnam, Apple included.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Maybe it wasn't such a bad Trump idea to just shut this thing
| down.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Apple needs Biden to step in and threaten to shut down Tiktok
| again if they go ahead with this. Hell, maybe he should just shut
| it down preemptively in the US and the EU should sue them over
| GDPR to make sure China gets the point.
|
| It is totally asymmetric for Apple to try to take on China in
| this and given their dependence on China for manufacturing (which
| I hope they are reconsidering now) they really can't afford to
| take them on.
| Redoubts wrote:
| I guess this explains their wild support response when I had
| trouble logging in with Apple SSO in their app
|
| https://imgur.com/a/Qbz7LwQ
| [deleted]
| ashneo76 wrote:
| Get. Out. of. china. Or be ruled by the authoritarianism of the
| CCP
| Daho0n wrote:
| Stop. Buying. Stuff. Made. In. China.
|
| Or does it not apply when it inconvenience you?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Stop. Buying. Stuff. Made. In. China._
|
| Easy to say when you're bloviating on the internet. Hard to
| do in real life. I know, because I try.
|
| I end up buying a good amount of vintage stuff to keep from
| supporting China. But there are a lot of things that aren't
| available at any price where I live that aren't made in
| China.
|
| I went through this a couple of years ago looking for a
| toaster. The only non-Chinese option available where I live
| was $900.
| imglorp wrote:
| Maybe that toaster is a good metaphor. Lots of people are
| willing to buy domestic if it's quality and costs a little
| more. It's not inconceivable to make a US$100 toaster
| outside of Asia.
| babycake wrote:
| > Stop. Buying. Stuff. Made. In. China.
|
| This isn't possible to follow on the individual level, even
| if you wanted to. Those 'Made in America' labels on product
| boxes aren't even accurate either, the parts can be built in
| China but assembled here, and still have that american label
| attached.
| spijdar wrote:
| Yeah, trying to avoid buying things with any components or
| work, or even most of the components from China is
| basically impossible.
|
| Still, it is sometimes possible to find alternatives that
| put proportionally more work and production into products
| outside China. I try to buy these things when I can, even
| when inevitably the materials or components come from
| China. Better than all the dollars going there, I figure...
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Not sure why purism is implied in the answer here. If
| anything, sentiments like these are akin to "reducing your
| carbon footprint" by taking more "environmentally conscious
| measures". Same language, same sentiment. While no one can
| reduce their carbon footprint to 0 for an extended period
| of time, the act of _trying_ to can prove real results when
| performed en masse.
| kar5pt wrote:
| I think that was his point.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Feeling depressed? Just. be. happy.
| disgu wrote:
| Have you missed the last decade where companies from all around
| the globe do this exact thing all the time because gathering
| your information is their business?
|
| Google and Facebook get caught doing it constantly. Just this
| week a lawsuit against Google was given the green light for
| gathering data when they were not supposed to. And isn't
| Facebook currently trying to illegally merge WhatsApp and
| Facebook data? Didn't the last US president complain about the
| EU stepping in to protect their citizens about this? Don't
| pretend this is some "evil China" problem.
| dannyr wrote:
| While I'm not a fan of the data gathering done by Google and
| Facebook, the magnitude of tracking done by China are far,
| far greater.
| disgu wrote:
| That's according to "I know China evil" or is this based on
| anything? We know that China was playing catch-up when
| Snowden leaked his stuff so they might have caught up. Can
| you link the corresponding leaks? I'd love to read some of
| the Chinese ones because the most recent big things I could
| find were Snowden leaks.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Playing the Snowden card doesn't invalidate what China is
| doing.
|
| What the U.S. was doing was bad. What China is doing is
| also bad. They can both be bad.
| okprod wrote:
| Yea but OP's statement that we're all responding to is
| "Get. Out. of. china. Or be ruled by the authoritarianism
| of the CCP"
| dannyr wrote:
| I have read a number of news articles and the book "We
| Have Been Harmonized" https://bookshop.org/books/we-have-
| been-harmonized-life-in-c...
|
| Is this enough for me to say "I Know China evil"?
| josh2600 wrote:
| Do you have any metrics or other proof to verify this
| statement?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Does pretty much every major newspaper around the world
| count?
| dannyr wrote:
| I read this book:
|
| We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance
| State - Kai Strittmatter (Author)
|
| https://bookshop.org/books/we-have-been-harmonized-life-
| in-c...
|
| "China's new drive for repression is being underpinned by
| unpre-cedented advances in technology: facial and voice
| recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases,
| intercepted cell phone conver-sations, the monitoring of
| app use, and millions of high-resolution security cameras
| make it nearly impossible for a Chinese citizen to hide
| anything from authorities. Commercial transactions,
| including food deliveries and online purchases, are fed
| into vast databases, along with everything from biometric
| information to social media activities to methods of
| birth control. Cameras (so advanced that they can locate
| a single person within a stadium crowd of 60,000) scan
| for faces and walking patterns to track each individual's
| movement."
| yumraj wrote:
| China blocked Signal.
|
| Is there a legal reason why US cannot block TikTok and other
| Chinese apps?
| anon9001 wrote:
| Technically, what's going on here?
|
| "CAID" isn't a public iOS technology, and the article doesn't say
| what it means.
|
| Some googling returns: https://mmachina.cn/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/02/MMA%E4%B8%AD%...
|
| Apparently it means "CAA Advertising Id", where "CAA" appears to
| be the "Creative Artists Agency", some sort of Chinese
| advertising group. (edit: wrong organization, it's actually
| "Chinese Anonymization ID", not a group. the group behind it is
| https://trackingio.com/)
|
| Searching "CAA Advertising Id" yields more Chinese PDFs.
|
| From what I can tell here, "CAID" is a partnership between
| Chinese industry and Chinese government to track users across
| apps for better tracking.
|
| The issue here does not seem to be that they've bypassed a
| technical restriction, but that the developers of major apps are
| using a shared identifier that Apple doesn't like.
|
| In the US, the analogy would be if apps had tracking SDKs in
| them, that fingerprinted users across apps, in order to better
| target them for advertisements, and then the US government can
| pick up that data and do whatever they'd like with it.
|
| The strange part to me, is that this actually _is_ the situation
| today in the US.
|
| I don't want to shill for China, but why is this a story? This
| has been a US industry since at least Doubleclick was invented.
|
| edit:
|
| It's a story because they're using the iOS keychain API to
| persist and share the tracking identifier. As far as I know, this
| is a new technique in the wild, but has been theoretically
| possible since iOS launched. It's only now being seen as
| necessary because of the iOS14 privacy changes.
|
| It's curious that American ad companies seem to understand
| Apple's intent and are opting not to risk their business by
| expanding their SDKs to use keychain sharing techniques, even
| though they're surely aware you can do this. Chinese ad companies
| seem ok with risking their clients apps being banned on the app
| store.
|
| Apple can mitigate this by giving users control of the data and
| sharing related to keychain services.
| some1else wrote:
| This reminds me of how Linkedin and many others used to upload
| entire phonebooks to unecrypted endpoints, making it simple for
| US agencies to analyze social networks of foreigners with
| impunity.
| GrayShade wrote:
| Did they really stop doing that?
| some1else wrote:
| Ha, good question. Generally, everyone switched to HTTPS.
| But that doesn't protect against situations like with
| Yahoo, where the agencies were tapped-in after the SSL
| termination. I guess it's not a stretch to assume it's
| still going on.
| Jonanin wrote:
| The story is that major Chinese companies and the state are
| working together to develop an alternative to Apple's IDFA.
| While aggressively pushing back against companies in the U.S.
| tracking users, Apple seemingly doesn't mind having a double
| standard for China.
| freeflight wrote:
| Is that really the story? When the USG requires Apple to
| access something on the basis of legal intercept then Apple
| will comply, as they did with the FBI and that mass shooter
| guy: Apple granted the FBI access to the iCloud account, the
| FBI botched it and then wanted access to the data on the
| physical phone, which Apple couldn't provide due to not
| knowing the encryption key.
|
| The only other "big stance on privacy" that Apple has is
| that, unlike their main competitor Google, they are not an
| advertisement business. So they have no real financial
| motivation to add tracking to their devices and software vs a
| Google were advertisement and user tracking are pretty big
| pillars of their financial income.
|
| Infrastructure like that is trivial to hijack for
| surveillance once in place, which privacy wise makes Google
| devices and software by default the worse choice unless using
| specifically cleaned and hardened custom roms.
|
| So while these two issues are related, legal intercept and
| privacy, they are not as easily conflated as you make it
| sound when you claim Apple is having "double standards" when
| they really are not "double standards" but simply abiding by
| local laws and regulations.
| CountSessine wrote:
| It's a bigger choice than that for them, or for anyone. If
| the government requires pervasive tracking, it's either allow
| it or stop selling phones in China, the world's biggest
| market for cell phones. And given that economies of scale
| matter (for things like swallowing flat rate development
| costs for those nice SOCs they design), it's hard to say
| goodbye to half your market.
|
| Samsung certainly won't take a principled stand on this and
| stop allowing app tracking. And in a competitive market,
| deciding to not sell cell phones in China means less
| development capital for designing the next generation of
| hardware. They'll start circling the drain and wind up like
| Motorola or HTC.
|
| I'm not saying that they shouldn't be consistent - just that
| choosing to not sell in China will mean losing everything
| outside of China eventually.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Apple seemingly doesn't mind having a double standard for
| China.
|
| That seems to be the case with many businesses. Nobody wants
| to lose that entire market just to stand on principle.
| gridder wrote:
| China is also the place where most of Apple products are
| produced, this matters a lot as well...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Google did and didn't stop existing as a company
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Google opted out of the Chinese market because it
| violated their principles? They didn't try to make a
| censored Chinese version of Google?
| summerlight wrote:
| A part of Google tried to do so and the majority of its
| employee (enough to scare its senior executives) fiercely
| rejected that attempt, so it gets overturned.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| Is that true? A _majority_ of Google employees protested
| Dragonfly? Last I heard there was a petition with just
| ~1% of them on it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _In the US, the analogy would be if apps had tracking SDKs in
| them, that fingerprinted users across apps, in order to better
| target them for advertisements, and then the US government can
| pick up that data and do whatever they 'd like with it._
|
| I've never really thought about it before, but it would be
| pretty easy for a three-letter agency to set up an online
| advertising company for this purpose.
|
| They start their own airlines (Air America, JANET, etc.), so
| starting an adtech company should be a walk in the park.
| [deleted]
| RandomSpanish wrote:
| There are some precedents, such as:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/epdkze/muslim-apps-
| location-...
| CountSessine wrote:
| But they don't even need to do that - they just approach an
| existing adtech company with a FISA warrant and get their
| data. If they started their own adtech company, eventually
| they would be out-ed and exposed. But with a FISA warrant,
| it's mostly business-as-usual for everyone.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> But they don 't even need to do that - they just
| approach an existing adtech company with a FISA warrant and
| get their data._
|
| Depending on who they approach, they won't even need a FISA
| warrant because in the US information voluntarily given to
| third parties has "no reasonable expectation of privacy"
| [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I've never really thought about it before, but it would be
| pretty easy for a three-letter agency to set up an online
| advertising company for this purpose.
|
| There's no need to set one up when you can break into
| many/all the existing advertising companies; remember "SSL
| added and removed here :^)" written on an NSA slide,
| referring to Google's clear-text internal data-center
| traffic? Also, the NSA spent a fuck-ton of money on compute
| to factor enough primes to trivially break 20-40%[1] of SSL
| traffic of the day...in real time.
|
| 1. This was about 6 years ago, I can't remember exact
| percentage, but it was definitely at least 20%, IIRC, the
| attack was on the key-exchange step
| DLay wrote:
| Here is the CAID spec:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210316035745/docs.trackingio.c...
| anon9001 wrote:
| That's very helpful and adds a lot of clarity.
|
| You can tell from the code that the "exploit" here is abusing
| keychain sharing.
|
| iOS has a feature where you can pack a surprising amount of
| generic data into keychain storage, intended for passwords or
| auth credentials.
|
| iOS also lets app developers opt-in to shared credential
| storage, so that if you have multiple apps, the user only
| needs to login once. Here's a blog post on how to do it:
| https://evgenii.com/blog/sharing-keychain-in-ios/
|
| A little-known quirk of the iOS keychain is that it persists
| across app installs. This is useful because if multiple apps
| share credentials in the keychain, you don't want
| uninstalling one app to log you out of other apps.
|
| If an American company tried this (looking at you Branch.io),
| would it be banned by Apple? Maybe? That seems to be the
| controversy here.
|
| Perhaps Apple needs to rethink its keychain sharing API and
| make the user opt-in to credential sharing.
|
| Also a keychain management tool would be nice, so users can
| see what data apps are permanently storing on their devices
| (even if the app is uninstalled).
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Credential sharing only works between apps registered to
| the same developer. So no, this does not allow an tracking
| ID usable by all apps.
|
| And remember, any trick abused to create tracking IDs
| stands the risk of being detected and blocked by Apple in
| the next iOS update. It has been announced, it has
| happened, it will keep happening.
| anon9001 wrote:
| > Credential sharing only works between apps registered
| to the same developer.
|
| That's right, but it does allow persisting an id through
| reinstalls of the same app, and sharing that id between
| apps of the same developer.
|
| > So no, this does not allow an tracking ID usable by all
| apps.
|
| It effectively does though. For example, imagine a mobile
| game company with 10 games. With this technique, you can
| track that user across app re-installs in each of those
| games.
|
| Now imagine another game company doing the same trick. If
| both companies send up their independent tracking IDs to
| a central server along with any other info they can get
| about the user (email, screen name, IP, whatever), then
| you can strongly correlate users across multiple tracking
| IDs. The user has no way to reset these IDs even if they
| delete and reinstall the apps using them.
| lilyball wrote:
| Apple tried removing the keychain persisting in an iOS
| beta a while back and there was a big outcry from
| developers as it broke their ability to detect and ban
| users across app reinstalls. Apple reverted that and
| responded by adding a new feature where developers could
| permanently track 2 boolean values for a device (per app)
| but I don't know who has bothered to switch to that
| mechanism.
| freebuju wrote:
| From what I understand, this CAID will be an effective
| replacement of Apple's IDFA. It will allow partner advertising
| groups to tag iPhone users directly without relying on any of
| Apple's identifiers.
| pityJuke wrote:
| > Creative Artists Agency
|
| This is wrong. Creative Artists Agency is a talent agency,
| based in the US, with the same abbreviation.
| [deleted]
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