Back

These changes were made a week or two before the *current* batch of protests, but this seems to be a distinction without a difference.

I am frankly still confused about why Apple can deploy end-to-end encrypted iMessage in China, at the same time it’s being asked to limit Airdrop.

I assume that one is vulnerable to metadata analysis and the other isn’t? That’s the only reasonable explanation I’ve got for it right now. (Maybe the explanation isn’t reasonable.)

By the way: you can see the transparency reports for Apple/China and it doesn’t seem like the Chinese government is doing massive numbers of *legal* (visible) requests to Apple. So if surveillance is happening on Apple devices/accounts it’s happening some other way.

Ok back to Airdrop. I feel very dense, but someone pointed out (duh) that Airdrop isn’t limited to your social graph — it’s a broadcast network. This makes it much more useful. I think that’s fascinating.

@matthew_d_green I guess something cool in that sense could be possible with air tags as well if you mix their use with some audacious signaling scenario .. but I also guess Apple really dislike it