Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

Apple stood up to the US government's requests to decrypt devices but capitulated to China's request to remove an image of another country's flag.

This is scarey.

Removing an emoji from a keyboard is as scary as hacking all of someone’s personal data?

> Removing an emoji from a keyboard is as scary as hacking all of someone’s personal data?

Yes. While seemly small, removing the emoji is an instance of political censorship.

Sure but there is obviously a difference in the effect.

Hiding an emoji is tiny, turning over all of someone’s files is much more intrusive, killing someone would be far worse again.

To say they are the same seems deeply illogical.

> Hiding an emoji is tiny, turning over all of someone’s files is much more intrusive, killing someone would be far worse again.

I think you need to distinguish between actions against society and actions against an individual. Censorship is almost always an action against society; turning over files is sometimes against society but often just against an individual.

That’s a clearly false distinction.

If Apple turns over the files of one individual to the government, then whole society is vulnerable to that, and this is incomparably more oppressive than removing a one of the UI buttons that displays a particular flag.

The thing you're not getting is that removing an emoji at government direction for political reasons leaves the whole of society open to other things getting removed for similar reasons: such as books, movies, news reports, etc. That's nearly always oppressive.

Turning over files to the government can be a normal law enforcement thing, and many societies have figured out how to do that and preserve civil liberties. It can be non oppressive.

The thing you aren’t getting is that hiding a single emoji button for a flag in Hong Kong makes almost no contribution to changing the state of Chinese censorship and is enshrined in Chinese law, whereas intentionally undermining encryption on consumer products in the US At the behest of the government is both unconstitutional, unprecedented and a massive concession to authoritarianism.

You continue to make an absurd and indefensible false equivalence.

> You continue to make an absurd and indefensible false equivalence.

You're stridently insisting on your interpretation, when there's more than one way to look at it. I'm just asking you to not dismiss the emoji thing so easily.