It was really rather stupid of the US government to imagine that public claims China was spying on consumers through their devices weren’t going to rebound hard on the US tech giants:
China has accused Apple of monitoring its users through spyware on its phones and computers.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said today that the world should be wary about the US tech company because it had assisted Washington to spy on ordinary users as well as country leaders ‘for as long as 10 years’.
Beijing’s spokesperson made the allegation after the United States claimed Chinese company Huawei could be collecting intelligence for Beijing and urged its allies to block the firm from their 5G networks. Hua Chunying, a spokesperson from the Ministry, also accused American IT provider Cisco of secretly collecting information from its users through the firm’s devices. Hua said: ‘As early as 2014, Apple acknowledged in a statement to have extracted personal data including short messages, contact lists, pictures from its users’ mobile phones through a “back door” in its system.’
She added: ‘According to leaked information by project PRISM, American people barely have any personal privacy in data including their phone calls, communications, documents and voice recordings in front of US intelligence. In additional, leaders from 35 countries – including some of America’s most intimate allies – have had their phone calls monitored. Some of them have been monitored for as long as 10 years.’
Just wait until they start going after Facebook and Google. I really fail to see how “you don’t want to let them spy on you, you should let US keep spying on you” is likely to be a successful sales pitch.