back to article Apple hands Chinese iCloud to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry

Apple has announced it will hand over iCloud operations in China to government-owned local partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry (GBCD) on February 28. Apple has made the move to comply with Chinese government policy, that demands domestic operators own foreign services' data centres so that data on Chinese citizens is …

  1. Mark 85

    regulations introduced in June 2016 also prevent transfer of sensitive economic, scientific or technological overseas

    Right... the data is only supposed to travel one way.... into China. I hear a lot of rumblings, not just from the tech side, of the Chinese ripping off whatever they can. The only copyright or patent they respect is the Chinese ones. There's been reports of Chinese citizens filing patents that are copies of US, UK, etc. ones.

    1. big_D Silver badge

      On the other hand, the EU has similar regulations.

      Especially for financial data, in Germany, if you want to use a cloud system to process your company data that contains any financial data, it either has to be stored in Germany or you need a special dispensation from the Treasury (Finanzamt).

    2. RichardB

      How odd... I came here to quote the exact same phrase, for a different reason.

      I guess Editors these days don't work to quite the same standards as they used to.... either that or there's a subtle joke about "data" not being in the right place that's wafted past me.

  2. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Hand over your source!

    This is going to end well, the Chinese government will have the source to the Chinese iCloud, which won't exactly be re-written from the ground up.

    How many months before another bunch of celebrity photos hits the news? Certainly less than a year.

    Time to empty your iCloud account.

  3. Wolfclaw

    No back doors, I better Apple had their fingers crossed and giggling quietly, the vast majority of Chinese tech is stolen and yet companies and governments too scared of Chinese money going missing to do anything !

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      There is no "iCloud source code"

      Apple used Amazon to store iCloud stuff at first before they built their own datacenters. They will be using this Chinese cloud provider, so there won't be any Apple IP involved. They just need a fat pipe, with hardware to decrypt the data when it reaches this cloud provider and then it will be stored on their cloud.

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