Adam Kos Apple has officially opened its first domestic data center in China. This comes more than three years after it began building a "facility" there to store customer data within the country's borders. And only within the borders of the country, because the data must not get outside of China. This is called privacy. I mean, almost.
As they stated local authorities, a data center in the southwestern province of Guizhou began operations on Tuesday. It will be operated by Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) and will be used to store Chinese customer's iCloud data in the domestic market. According to state media XinhuaNet "will improve the experience of Chinese users in terms of access speed and service reliability". What else could you wish for?
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Bend over and don't hesitate
In 2016, the Chinese government passed a new cybersecurity law that forced Apple to store data about its Chinese customers on local servers. The following year, Apple signed an agreement with the government to begin setting up its first data center in the country. Construction of the facility began in March 2019 and has now started. It's a win-win for Apple, for China, and a total loss for users there.
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Apple does not own the data. As part of the agreements, they are the property of GCBD. And that allows Chinese authorities to demand data from the telecom firm, not Apple. So, if some authority came to Apple and told it to provide it with data about user XY, it would of course not comply. But if that authority comes to GCBD, they will tell him the whole story about poor XY from A to Z.
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Yes, although Apple claims that it is still the only one with access to the encryption keys. But security experts warn that the Chinese government will actually have physical access to the servers. And to make matters worse, Apple is planning another one Data Center, namely in the city of Ulanqab in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
