Apple is the worst offender here, they really bend over backwards. It is proper to single them out too as they are one of the biggest providers of consumer goods at a high margin. There is absolutely no reason they should be forced to use slave labour in china. That's not to say there are other companies that do the same, but they are not as valuable or provide such a highly visible product.
Imagine the effect if Apple actually took a decent stance here and how it could spread awareness about the conditions there.
Google for instance decided to just pull out of the market, I have a lot of respect for that.
> Google for instance decided to just pull out of the market
Not out of any moral sense. They were pissed off that China kept hacking their data centers.
>In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge.
They went on to create a censored search engine, named after their founder's mega-yacht, to try to get back into China.
> Google’s internal project to bring censored search back to China, Dragonfly, was kept secret until revealed by The Intercept. Internal dissent, objections from senators and the vice president, and worldwide protests followed.
"Google for instance decided to just pull out of the market, I have a lot of respect for that. "
Seems unlikely to have been a matter of principle rather than practicality; Google only recently moved Pixel phone production away from China, yet the ethical issues have been well known for many years.
Yes, they might not be 100% ethical in this decision, but the fact is that they are not operating in China. It would potentially be a huge market for them.
I have the impression that their advertising and cloud businesses are just not welcome in China, and if that's correct then it's all practicality and no ethics involved.
All the market analyst comments I've read about moving manufacturing of phones focused on cost and supply chain reliability with no mention of ethics either.
If I remember, the reason they were not welcome was that they didn't want to censor stuff and hand everything over to the CCP.
But I see the sibling post, I think the management probably wanted to get in here, but apparently the internal uproar made them cancel it[1]. I have yet to see an uproar from apple employees over using slave labour to make their phones or handing data over to the CCP.
Google are not saints, but I prefer the path they took. Even if it was bumpy.
You don't create a censored Chinese search engine to try to break back into the Chinese market if there is any truth to the notion that management is staying out of China over ethical concerns.
> Google’s Chinese search app would have reportedly complied with demands to remove content that the government ruled sensitive and linked users’ searches to their personal phone numbers.
