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A new report this week claims that Apple has expanded censorship tools use in mainland China to include Hong Kong.
According to a piece from The Intercept (opens in new tab) on Thursday, “Apple quietly expanded the use of Chinese company Tencent’s website blacklist to users in Hong Kong — and no one will answer questions about it.”
Sam Biddle reports an instance in December where Safari users in Hong Kong tried to load GitLab and received ” a strange warning” claiming the site was blocked for user safety.”
“The access was temporarily cut off thanks to Apple’s use of a Chinese corporate website blacklist, which resulted in the innocuous site being flagged as a purveyor of misinformation,” the report states, claiming that neither Apple nor Tencent, the Chinese firm it uses for safe browsing filters in the country, would say how or why this had happened.
Censorship in Hong Kong?
As the report notes, a warning screen from Tencent, which created WeChat and owns League of Legends as well as part of Apple’s App Store rival Epic Games, “operates the safe browsing filter for Safari users in China on Apple’s behalf,” claiming it has now extended this safe browsing filter into Hong Kong.
The Intercept notes that Apple “originally said the Tencent blocklist would be used only for Safari users inside mainland China” but quietly added a note to its privacy policy sometime after November 24, 2022, stating “that the Tencent blacklist would be used for devices in Hong Kong as well.”
The report claims that by “silently expanding the scope of the Tencent list” Apple can “remain in the good graces of China” while receiving “plausible deniability about how or why such site blocks happen.” The former is critical to the manufacturing of devices like Apple’s best iPhone, the iPhone 14.
iMore has reached out to Apple for comment on the matter, but The Intercept notes that Apple declined to answer questions about the incident in response to the original story.
Citizen Lab researcher Jeffrey Knockel told the outlet that while “Tencent’s compliance with the Chinese national security agenda ought not to come as a surprise,” Apple’s should. Knockel further claimed that it was less important as to how or why GitLab may have been blocked by Safe Browsing, but rather that “Tencent’s blocking of GitLab for Safari users underscores that Apple’s subjection of Hong Kong users to screening via a China-based company,” which he says “is problematic not only in principle but also in practice.”
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