not sure i have same understanding of net neutrality

@michael2015

Uh duh? Companies use email and other free services to sell ads. Great point if I and every twelve year old on the planet didn't know this already. Don't start off with patronizing comments.

Kudos to Apple? Uh no. If they pulled a Yahoo and didn't tell anyone they were just going to hand over your emails, pics, SMS, contacts, files, they'd be crucified like Yahoo was for getting people thrown into prison.

Your icloud CRYPTOkey now resides with a Guizhou state run company. That a gigantic difference than when even your data might of been on a China server, but that key was in the hands of Cupertino Apple. Now pretty much any state or even local police anywhere in China can demand the Guizhou company to comply with a search warrant, and as the article made clear, police in China can issue the search warrant without asking anyone but themselves to issue one.

But I guess your right, for the 99.9% of the users who aren't human rights lawyers, political activists, journalists, environmental protesters, villagers involved in land disputes, this won't affect a thing, and yeah, your icloud may download faster, cheers!

It will download faster and no vpn required either.

I know Kunming has a missionary community, so I'd add that to the list of the 0.1%. I think apple maps uploads GPS data history in batches too. I know Google maps does this.

we know who you are, we know what you bin sayin and we knows where youve been

Probably has already been mentioned before, but this only applies to Chinese-registered iCloud accounts. If you are 外国人who set up your account in your home country, shouldn’t affect you.

@alienew
If you're INSIDE the GFW (Great FireWall), lower probability of getting swept up in the inevitable and seemingly random blocking of US, UK, and EU centric sites a la Bloomberg and Google. Want to live in China or any country for that matter, abide by and respect the rules, laws, and guidelines of that country. Don't like it - have a beer or whine about it on expat forums.

@AlexKMG
The point to the seemingly puerile comment is that the common and pervasive perception of "net neutrality" and internet privacy is and has been an illusionary misconception for decades, especially in today's environment of trending radicalized terrorism.

The internet is already a gigantic public and private window into "you" already. The alleged security and privacy you "feel" is an illusion - especially here in China.

well, if you encrypt all your data, photo....etc before sending/sync them to the cloud service, any cloud service, you data would be securer. :-)

that is exactly what i been doing. even some emails that is of business nature. :-)

still not sure i share micheals idea of what net neutrality is

I would have thought, net neutrality is to do with bandwidth. the internet is a bit like a freeway, all vehicles regardless whether it a Ford or VW... is allowed to travel on a freeway with the allowed speed limit. the net neutrality opponents proposed otherwise, which if successful, will make vehicles that deliver certain commercially contents having priority over others. like, ie, Netflix will be allotted with higher priority hence better user experience. that is another kind of content "censorship," in my humble opinion. :-)