Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly met with China’s market regulator in Beijing shortly after banning the HKMap.live app, which was used to track police and protest activity in Hong Kong.
Business Insider reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s chief of market regulation just days after Apple removed the Hong Kong police activity tracking app, HKMap.live, from its App Store. According to a statement from China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, Cook met with the Agency’s chief Xiao Yaqing this week to discuss a number of topics.
Some of the topics discussed reportedly included Apple’s investment in China, consumer rights protection, and corporate social responsibility. Cook has defended the company’s recent decision to remove the HKmap.live app from its store, stating that they had received “credible information” from authorities that the software was being used “maliciously” to attack police.
The company has flip-flopped repeatedly on whether the app should be allowed in the store, initially telling developers: “Your app contains content – or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity – that is not legal … specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement,” and banning the app.
Following an outcry over the initial banning, the app was reinstated to Apple’s store. After criticism from the Chinese Communist Party’s main newspaper, The People’s Daily, which stated that the app “facilitates illegal behavior,” leading it to question if Apple was “guiding Hong Kong thugs,” The Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe have once against bowed to the wishes of communist China and removed the app.
Cook wrote in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News: “Over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.”
Prominent Hong Kong lawmaker, Charles Mok, penned an open letter on Twitter criticizing Apple’s decision, stating: “I sincerely hope that Apple will choose to support its users and stop banning HKmap.live simply out of political reason [sic] or succumbing to China’s influence like other American companies appear to be doing.”
China is still a major market for Apple despite the Chinese state media’s criticism. Greater China which includes mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan was Apple’s third-biggest market in the third quarter this year generating $9.1 billion in revenue.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com