A total of 53 VPN applications have become unavailable on Apple’s Hong Kong app store since Beijing imposed a National Security Law (NSL) on the city in June 2020, a report by AppleCensorship reveals.
The Digital Freedom Watchdog urged the US tech giant to be clear on how it would react if Hong Kong or Beijing requested app removals.
In a report released Thursday titled “Apps at Risk: Apple’s Censorship and Compromises in Hong Kong,” AppleCensorship found that Hong Kong had more apps unavailable than most of the 173 app stores it monitored.
According to the latest statistics from AppleCensorship last month, 2,370 or 16 percent of the 14,782 apps tested were unavailable in the Hong Kong App Store.
The watchdog said only stores in Russia and China had more unavailable apps than their Hong Kong counterpart – Russia had 2,754 and China 10,837.
The report states that “a significant number of VPN apps appear to have been removed from Hong Kong’s App Store following the passage of the NSL,” putting the number at 53. Many other VPN apps, including the most popular ones, remain in Hong Kong App Store.
AppleCensorship said these VPNs ensure Hong Kongers always have an eye on content that may be removed, but added that “if more VPN apps are removed from Hong Kong, or if Beijing demands that Apple impose a systematic outright ban on Permeated with VPNs, as is currently being done in China, this mirror could quickly disappear.”
Aside from VPN providers, the watchdog also noted that some media apps are no longer available on the Hong Kong App Store, including TV Martí+, developed by the United States Agency for Global Media, and news aggregator NewsBreak: Local News.
The report also cited Apple’s previous “censorship acts,” which included removing a card application used by pro-democracy protesters to “endanger police” in 2019 and refusing to engrave sensitive words on products in Hong Kong and China .
In light of their findings, AppleCensorship urged the US tech giant to publicly state whether it would oppose any requests for deactivation by government agencies in Beijing or Hong Kong.
Apple should be transparent when such requests are made and allow third-party applications to be installed “to make censorship requests a less efficient tool for the authorities.”
The company was also urged to abide by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and avoid “causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts” in Hong Kong.
Benjamin Ismail, Apple’s censorship project lead, told HKFP he still thinks it’s possible the public or organizations are pressuring Apple to resist app removal requests from Hong Kong and Beijing.
“For years we have exposed Apple and denounced Apple’s post-censorship actions. In this case, some things have already started, but there is more to prevent and we are trying to prevent that,” Ismail said.
“The main problem, as we outlined in the report, is that we don’t know how Apple will react if authorities increase censorship in the future.”
HKFP has reached out to Apple for comment.
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Peter Lee is a reporter for HKFP. He was previously a freelance journalist at Initium, covering political and court news. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Global Communications from CUHK.
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