The removal of applications from the App Store in China continues its pace with the approval of Apple. A few days ago, the Chinese government demanded the withdrawal of a Coran app, despite being a religion recognized by China. Now it is the turn of Yahoo Finance, one of the the last vestiges that survived the Yahoo debacle.
According to Censorchip, a website that tracks deletions and changes in the App Store, the Yahoo Finance application, used by many Chinese users to access news from abroad It has not been available in the Apple store since last October 14.
Apparently, Chinese citizens used this application to read news from the media that generally they are mainly blocked by the Great Firewall of China.
As stated by The Telegraph, this application had achieved circumvent government-set content restrictions, something that caught the attention of the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, with the consequent expulsion from the App Store.
Causally, days before Yahoo Finance's disappearance from the Strore App, it showed a Bloomberg article criticizing China's crackdown on the tech industry. The article pointed to a preferential treatment towards Apple in exchange for complying with government requests, including removing apps without asking for any justification.
Benjamin Ismail, Project Director for Apple Censorship, states that:
Recently, Apple has been removing many applications at the request of the Chinese authorities. But complying with government orders is different from complying with the law, especially in China, where authorities often resort to extra-legal means to muzzle the press, bloggers, activists, or any dissenting voice.
I keep the principles in my pocket
Apple has been characterized in recent years by declaring itself a champion of human rights causes, such as freedom of expression and free access to information.
However, Apple flinches at Chinese government requests. A gigantic consumer market is at stake, a market that can mark the success or failure of a tech giant.
However, just like Google did in 2010, when he decided to withdraw from China in order not to comply with requests for censorship and Microsoft a few days ago removing LinkedIn For the same reasons, Apple continues to lower its head and look away instead of standing at once.