The Chinese government has just approved a new law called Electronic Security, a law that will not please Apple. The new electronic security law has to do with the way in which the information of the different services of the company in the country is managed. First of all, keep in mind that This law does not exclusively affect Apple, but affects all companies that provide services of any kind in the country like Microsoft without going any further. The Chinese government wants to have the closer the better the data of its citizens, corroborating, in case anyone had any doubts, that in China the word privacy does not exist.
This new law that will come into force as of June of next year and obliges all companies that handle data of companies or people in the country to host them on servers in the country. Apple has several data centers around the world. Each data center is responsible for managing different Apple services by continents, but they do not focus all the information of the services and the data in the same place, something that if the Chinese government wants to do.
This new law obliges companies to offer technical service to Chinese security agencies, agencies that will be in charge of reviewing the security of the servers where all the information is stored in order to ensure that no citizen intends to harm national unity. Although Apple has always been characterized by defending the privacy of its users, this time it will have no choice but to give up if it wants to continue selling Chinese terminals, especially after the titanic investment it has made in the country by opening 41 Apple Stores.
The control over the information to which the citizens of the country have access has always been a concern for the authorities of the country, which in charge of censoring or blocking any source that may pose a danger to national unity. Apple News is blocked in the country like the iBooks Store and iTunes Movies, the latter two for a few months.
But it is not the only one. Google arrived in China in 2006 but left in 2010 after getting tired of continually censoring results in his on-demand searches of the Chinese government. Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube are other services that are also blocked in the country.