China seems to be doing everything to tighten the noose against foreign companies by making the business environment hostile to them. As such many of these companies are either exiting the country or outsourcing their services to a subsidiary. A good example of this is Uber merging with Chinese ride-hailing service, Didi Chuxing.
Now, Apple’s iCloud services in mainland China will, henceforth, be operated by a Chinese company as from February 28th. It has contacted customers based in the country, advising them to examine new terms and conditions. They include a clause that both Apple and the Chinese firm will have access to all data stored on iCloud.
Apple said it had made the move to comply with the country’s cloud computing regulations adding that iCloud accounts registered outside of China are not affected.
The firm taking over Apple’s iCloud is called Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD). It’s based in Guizhou Province and supervised by a board run by government-owned businesses.
Apple assured customers that data remains secure and private. “Apple has strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems,” it says.
