Device management apps are given access to (almost) everything by the operating system by design. Further, it seems Russia wants the same unrestricted access to iCloud data that China got. Apple has already set a precedent with China, so expect more of this.
There was a series in a British magazine, many years ago, where a journalist would ring up a restaurant asking for special treatment for a celebrity. So they'd ring up The Ivy or whatever and say "Look, Madonna is coming in, is it possible you can serve her kid some chips?". The gag was that when it was an A-lister, the restaurant would always bend over backwards for them, but when they rang up as Kerry Katona or something, the restaurant would give a stiffly worded response along the lines of "The Ivy only serves the highest in culinary quality, and Ms Katona should leave her kids at home".
Anyway, China is a gigantic, buoyant market with a huge and growing middle class who will be Apple consumers for a long time, and also a crucial part of Apple's manufacturing strategy. CCP ain't going anywhere fast.
Russia is a failing state, and anyone who aides and abets the regime is likely to be considered an enemy of the people in a few years time, let alone the reputational damage in other Western countries of supporting Putin's regime.
It wasn’t stated that Russia was mandating device management.
And just like if a regular app can cause security issues, it’s the fault of the operating system and should be fixed, if your data on the cloud can be read by an adversary, instead of only having the private keys on the device, that’s a flaw in the implementation that Apple needs to fix. Yes si realize that everything stored on iCloud is not E2E encrypted. That’s the real issue, not that the data is in China.
I don’t trust the US government anymore than I trust the Chinese government.
> That’s the real issue, not that the data is in China.
In the US, data requests have to be for individual accounts and go through a judge and sent to the company, who might file an appeal. This is not the case in China. The government can simply get the data it wants without any company appeal.
> It wasn’t stated that Russia was mandating device management
Nor was it stated that it isn't. My point was that the sandbox doesn't automatically imply that these apps are safe, as you had claimed.
You trust government transparency more than I do. But wasn’t there just a case where Google gave our location data of anyone who was in a certain area.
I would much rather that Apple designer a system where it couldn’t give out the information because it didn’t have an unencrypted version of the data in the first place.
> wasn’t there just a case where Google gave our location data of anyone who was in a certain area.
"Google first provided location data, but no identifying information, for 19 devices in a 150-meter radius around the bank for a one-hour period that included the robbery. Police then picked out nine of those devices for more information, and Google gave location data on those devices covering two hours. Finally, police asked for — and received — subscriber information for three devices, including one that was in the bank during the robbery, left immediately after it, and followed a path matched by witness sightings."
In China, the police would simply access the location history of all iPhone users in the area, complete with identifying information, without Apple's involvement.
In one case, the government doesn't actually know all the people who were there. In the other case, the government knows all the people who were there and everywhere else.
