Collaboration or privacy: pick one

Matt Novak, writing at Gizmodo on October 22:

President Donald Trump is currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House in one of the more shocking acts of his second term. Trump plans to build an enormous $250 million ballroom in its place, a structure that will dwarf the existing White House. But who’s paying for it? As it turns out, a bunch of private companies and individuals. And, presumably, they’ll now expect to get a lot more access to Trump.

Trump invited tech executives to dinner at the White House in early September, and CBS News reports that the president’s meeting was “interpreted” by at least one company as an appeal for donations. That kind of language suggests that Trump is again utilizing the mob-boss style of language that he’s become known for. Trump can’t explicitly say, “give me money or I’m going to make life hard for your company.” But he’s suggested exactly that several times since taking office in January.

Trump had another dinner at the White House just last week, and it featured some of the biggest names in tech and crypto, including Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as Coinbase, Tether, and Ripple.

I’ve seen defenses of Apple’s past kowtowing to the Trump administration; they boil down to, what else do you expect them to do? Are we expecting Apple to lead the resistance? They have a business to run, and this administration has made it clear that they’ll make life difficult for businesses that don’t play ball.

I get it, and I have as much sympathy for a giant multinational megacorporation as I can possibly muster here. For all its missteps and foibles, I love Apple’s products, and—up until the last decade or so—loved the personality they conveyed. “Think Different” wasn’t just a great slogan; it expressed a genuine philosophy.

But there’s a difference between “playing ball” and proactively offering to pay for a new baseball field. Apple could be doing the least of what they need to do to get by in this current moment; they’re actively choosing to go above and beyond. Giving obsequious gifts is a choice, not a necessity. Taking down ICEBlock due to an informal demand rather than a legal injunction is a choice, not a necessity. And funding the destruction of the East Wing of the White House is a choice, not a necessity.

While funding the Epstein Ballroom isn’t as egregious in a First Amendment sense as removing ICEBlock was, there’s a way in which it feels more troubling, because it can’t be taken as anything but servile submission. You can’t credibly defend that with what else do you expect them to do. So far, every time this administration has said “jump,” Apple has not only said “how high,” they’ve offered to throw a few more jumps in for good measure.

Apple, in the Tim Cook era, has built much of their reputation on privacy, and from all appearances, they’ve genuinely meant it. Their platforms do offer a higher degree of privacy than you can get by default with Android or Windows. The Trump administration, by contrast, has built their reputation on going after all enemies, real or imagined, with all the tools they can dream up—chief among them being the rapid expansion of the surveillance state. They’ve gone out of their way to monitor constitutionally protected speech, to let ICE use facial recognition to track immigrants and tie their identities to “derogatory information”, and to break down barriers between data silos so they can profile you without court oversight.

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of ways this administration might pressure Apple (or Google or Microsoft) to give up their users, to quietly—or even openly—build in the kind of back doors that Apple has, in the past, resisted. Even a year ago, if you’d have asked me whether Apple would keep resisting that, I’d have answered “yes” without hesitation.

Now, though? Even before this ballroom fiasco, we recognized that the question was no longer “will Apple cooperate,” that it had become “is there a line Apple won’t cross.” But every time you say “yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir” to someone like Trump, the more he’s going to ask for next time—and the less power you’re going to have to say no. Maybe there still is a line Apple won’t cross, but each new collaboration pushes that line farther into the distance.

To an authoritarian regime, there can be no such thing as a right to privacy against the government. They require, they demand, the right to surveil their citizens in any and every way possible. And a company whose reputation is built on a promise of privacy cannot collaborate with such a government and keep that promise. I’m no longer confident that, at the end of the day, Apple has the courage to not cross that line.