After the latest brawl between Apple and China, one might have believed that things couldn't be any more interesting than that. However, as it stands right now, such is not the case. A new report shows that Apple has completed a plan that began 15 months ago to store Chinese iCloud data in China; the NSA won't be too happy about this.
Apple claims it has chosen to go this route to make its iCloud service faster for Chinese consumers. Furthermore, Apple wants to have increased reliability across the board, and the best way to do that is to remove Chinese data from the U.S. and have it stored in the country itself.
This move might be one of the reasons why China has halted its assault on Apple, but it doesn't mean everything has gone back to the way it was before.
All data will be kept at China Telecom Corp, according to Apple. China Telecom is the country's third largest wireless carrier with around 300 million subscribers.
"Apple takes user security and privacy very seriously," it said. "We have added China Telecom to our list of data center providers to increase bandwidth and improve performance for our customers in mainland china. All data stored with our providers is encrypted. China Telecom does not have access to the content."
Chinese users who might be worried about the government's version of the NSA gaining access to all the data, need not fret. Sources close to the situation claims that the encryption key needed to gain access to the data is not with China Telecom, but somewhere offshore.
Additionally, Apple claims that the encryption methods used can't be unlocked by anyone, not even itself.
China has turned out to be one of Apple's most important markets. Apple can't afford to be in a spat with the country's government, as the company's bottom line depends on it. Furthermore, China is the main driver of Apple's high quarterly revenues, as the market accounts for more than 16 percent of the company's worldwide revenues.
We suspect that Apple will have quite a few years of peace in China from the government after allowing Chinese consumer data to be stored outside of the U.S. However, things could change in the future, but it might all come down to how the Chinese government feels towards those sitting in the White House.
