>The first priority is always profits or growth.
When Apple split with Google, they did so over access to customer data. At the time wall street was salivating over the huge profits to be gained from mining customer data, and Google was dangling billions of dollars in front of Steve Jobs' face to get him to fold. He didn't, and also turned down lucrative deals offered by Facebook.
That was all at a time when user privacy was widely seen as a marginal issue, and long before big privacy breaches regularly got into the mainstream press. Apple could have made huge amounts of money, but instead they turned those deals down and instead spent billions of dollars building their own maps and engineering iMessage with end-to-end encryption. No other tech company has come even close to Apple's record on user privacy and security. I can't even think of another one that's even tried.
That's what's so upsetting for me over this HK Maps issue. I know they have a lot at stake, including the livelihoods and safety and security of thousands of employees in China, but I still think they made the wrong call on this.
iMessage is pretty secure, but there are practical limits to how secure it can be, while also enabling cloud backups and data recovery options. Here's a somewhat sensationalised take, which does go into the practical reasons for the limitations. What it doesn't point out is that if you don't enable iCloud backup (maybe just backing up to iTunes), your secure keys never go to the iCloud servers so there is actually a way to stay secure even in China.
https://medium.com/bob-kfir-tech/how-secure-is-imessage-8cc7...