[krechmidas]

I’m in China, I use Apple for privacy and a foreign SIM so my data never touches any servers here. I did use Android but I’ve heard horror stories and decided to get an iPhone instead, price and shinyness doesn’t factor into it.

[mirimir]

> I’m in China, I use Apple for privacy and a foreign SIM so my data never touches any servers here.

Woah! How does that work? Are you close enough to the border to use non-Chinese cell towers?

[rosser]

A few years ago, I visited Tibet with friends. One of our group was a T-Mobile subscriber, and was able to leverage their roaming agreement with the PRC (and its bypassing the Great Firewall) to read and post on Facebook, among others.

[seanmcdirmid]

Some Hong Kong sims can roam in China outside of the great firewall. Also, it used to be kindle would work in China on twice of the GFW to, for some odd reason.

[spacehunt]

Letting you through the GFW and not actually touching any servers are two completely orthogonal concepts though.

Also, if your iCloud country is set to China it doens't matter which country you're in or what SIM you use; your iCloud account will be stored in a Chinese data centre: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/apple-sends-icloud-c...

[seanmcdirmid]

Right. Conversely, if you are a foreigner in China with a non Chinese Apple account, you skip the Chinese server as well. This is just a matter of setting your country, and you can still use the Chinese App Store if you wish (just set it to China, install app, then set it back to the USA).

Skype and TomTom are a bit different though.