Our institutions, corporations, and government agencies have been greasing the skids for Chinese business interests for many years. It’s important to understand that this entails offering unfair money-making advantages to the Chinese government as well, and that’s the real problem.
The reason for this is two-fold, but easy to understand. First, it’s because the high level of government regulation in Chinese business practices makes Chinese business and Chinese government one and the same, essentially. Second, the Communist Chinese Party is run by dynastic powers that care nothing for their own people nor for human rights in general, and seek only to expand their own power. In a nutshell, it’s a tradition of corruption and nepotism that is several millennia old.
Former President Donald J Trump did his best to warn us about the danger of the Chinese government. But because he said the word “China” in a funny way, too many Americans took the left-wing derision as plausible. So, now we’re in a proper mess.
It has been known for some time that online services like Zoom, Facetime, and TikTok are built with back-doors that allow Chinese corporations to siphon off valuable user data. User data of all kinds is worth a great deal to advertisers, and intelligence agencies. It’s worth noting that any government intelligence agency is interested in one thing, information supremacy — which is achieved in two ways — intelligence gathering and deception.
According to the Financial Times, major Chinese tech firms are working around the clock to bypass the security features of information services to which they do not already have back-door access. FT says they have an especially large interest in defeating privacy controls put into place by the Apple corporation. Apple has gone to some lengths to protect its users from the ruthless information-seeking eyes of advertisers.
The FT report states that ByteDance and Tencent, some of China’s most powerful tech firms, are testing tools designed to defeat Apple’s privacy measures. In response, Apple is expected to roll-out some new tools and features to counteract Chinese spying on their customers.
A few years back, the FBI was demanding that Apple give them backdoor access to their mobile phones. They claimed they needed it to learn more about the activities of a Muslim mass shooter couple in California leading up to the killings. Apple refused, at least as far as the public has been told. Now, they are sticking to their guns as China levels the same pressure against them.
As far we the American public can tell, Apple’s resistance to Chinese spying is steadfast. However, we should remember that Apple has sweatshops in China where pay and working conditions are so bad that they had to install horizontal “suicide nets” around the outside of buildings to stop workers from plummeting to their deaths. With the Apple company still doing business this way inside Chinese borders, we wonder how long they can really maintain this stance against the Chinese government — if they are indeed doing what we are being told they are doing.
