[fragmede]

I trust Apple's commitment to privacy as much as I do Google's, but when they both remove a product over a stupid patent rather than pay the patent holder (Sonos' sued Google with their multiroom audio patent), we can see that it's possible for corporations to hold principled views about things.

[rogerkirkness]

Google doesn't do business in China because they won't agree to the privacy violating terms of doing so, that is at least a $1T principle if you compare it to the amount of hardware and services that Apple sells there.

[snotrockets]

Google’s executives would very much like to operate in China, only they faced public pressure (the term to search for is “project dragonfly”).

I won’t be surprised if they’ll retry to enter China soon.

[robertlagrant]

Public pressure vs $1tn. Hmm.

[snotrockets]

Right now, part of that pressuring public also includes elected representatives in positions of some power over Google, which is quite the stick.

Of course, such elected are replaced every few years.

[robertlagrant]

So it's not public pressure, it's powerful people who don't like Google.

[snotrockets]

Those people are beholden to public pressure. That's how representative governments tend to work.

[seanmcdirmid]

They faced internal pressure from employees as I remember it. They shutdown their Chinese sites after the PLA was caught hacking Gmail accounts in Hong Kong, but this was when Paige and Sergey were more involved (being from formerly authoritarian communist countries).

[snotrockets]

You didn’t bother to search, so let me paste the relevant content for you here:

> The Dragonfly project was an Internet search engine prototype created by Google that was designed to be compatible with China's state censorship provisions.

> The public learned of Dragonfly's existence in August 2018, when The Intercept leaked an internal memo written by a Google employee about the project.

> […]

> However, according to employees, work on Dragonfly was still continuing as of March 2019, with some 100 people still allocated to it.

> In July 2019, Google announced that work on Dragonfly had been terminated.

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine), literally the first Google search result on that keyword)

[seanmcdirmid]

None of that conflicts with what I said.

[snotrockets]

Your comment suggests rank and file had power to shut it down (they didn't: it was the public scrutiny), or that it was shut down in response to happening a decade before it was shut down.

[JCharante]

> but this was when Paige and Sergey were more involved (being from formerly authoritarian communist countries).

Does this mean S&P would be more receptive to operations in China or less receptive to it?

[seanmcdirmid]

Less, much less.

[GeekyBear]

The only things that prevented Google from returning to the China market, were public pressure and an employee revolt.

> Google employees are calling on the company to cancel Project Dragonfly, an effort to create a censored search engine in China.

“Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits,” an open letter signed by Google employees published Tuesday on Medium says. “After a year of disappointments including Project Maven, Dragonfly, and Google’s support for abusers, we no longer believe this is the case.”

Google’s Chinese search app would have reportedly complied with demands to remove content that the government ruled sensitive and linked users’ searches to their personal phone numbers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/read-google-employees-open-l...

[mulmen]

Is that a fair comparison? Apple sells devices, Google sells targeted advertising. Their business and constraints are different.

[JCharante]

Apple has iCloud and chooses which governments to give the keys to

[MikusR]

Apple also sells services.

[alt227]

Apple mainly sells services

[patentatt]

I find this dubious. Google is not known for respecting privacy, and large corporations in general are not known for voluntarily passing on trillion dollar markets on moral grounds. Is there perhaps an alternative explanation that isn't as far fetched?

[donkers]

This has some context on Google’s exit from China. They refused to censor the search engine to China’s liking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010–2016:_Giving...

[GeekyBear]

> They refused to censor the search engine to China’s liking.

Google had no problem with censoring the search results in China. They exited the country after it began hacking into their data centers.

> Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.

Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html

[smallstepforman]

Google have a history of censorship in western countries, as evidenced by the scrubbing of all C19 alternative information which didn’t align with TPTB narratives.

[Kbelicius]

Only after they were hacked by China, before that they had no problems with censorship. They also had a plan to return. Doubt there were any principles in play when making decisions on their China operarions

[scarface_74]

Google won’t do business in China because it is blocked in China.

But they still make hardware there like everyone else

[rib3ye]

Doesn’t every Chinese smartphone run android? Is that totally without profit? Honest question.

[ddxv]

Apple's mobile "privacy" features are about monopolizing advertising on their mobile products so that Apple is now the number one iOS advertising company.

[alt227]

Id go the whole way and say that their entire walled garden ecosystem is designed to do this as well. Most Apple device users that I have spoken to have absolutely no idea how much it makes from advertising inside its own services.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-now

[fingerlocks]

That’s isolated to the App Store and News app, exactly where you would expect it.

[Moto7451]

Principled is defined as “acting with morality and showing recognition of right and wrong.”

How is abiding by the decision of a court not following a principled view? Wouldn’t going against the rule of law be non-principles behavior? Apple is not required to license the patent nor is the holder required to ever license their patent. They can tell Apple to go pound sand as this isn’t the seemingly typical cell phone FRAND dispute.

Trying to find a way to build an Apple Watch 9 that doesn’t infringe on a patent is a valid and principled way of behaving, even if it’s perhaps a bad business choice. If it takes them a week or two and stands in court it’ll be seen as a good decision. If they can’t and pony up anyway it’ll be seen as a poor choice of action. We’ll certainly know soon enough.

[eganist]

> principled views about things.

Selfishly* principled. There's no exclusively abstract benefit here the way there is with e.g privacy rights; there's both the benefit of not having to pay royalties if they prevail as well as the second order benefit of deterring others from submitting patent litigation because other plaintiffs will know that Apple would rather burn cash reserves on litigation than on paying.

It's precisely for that reason that Apple should lose.

[jmyeet]

This isn't a principled stand. Or rather it is but not a principle that matters to you: it's about not setting a precedent that they'll cave to patent trolls to avoid future patent trolls seeing them as an easy target. So they have to fight every patent suit to make it eceonomically unviable for patent trolls to sue them.

As for privacy, as an aside, Apple's track record is substantially better than Google's.