11.14.12
Apple Censors Criticism of Its Abused Labour Force
Summary: Using its authority over a digital store, Apple is blocking human rights messages
Rep. Kucinich recently complained about Apple’s decision to assassinate applications that deal with drone strikes. The Hill covered the news. Steve Jobs and his intolerance of Android, pornography, workers’ rights [[cref =53137 1], 2], etc. probably tell us he would have condoned the censorship. Watch what else Apple is censoring, unlike Android: a Foxconn game.
It was too much for the guiltily-sensitive Apple App Store, they removed it an hour after it went live, but Android is made of sterner stuff and ‘In A Permanent Save State,’ an interactive, artistic work by Benjamin Poynter is now available at Google Play Store for $0.99.
Poynter’s artistic piece (all hand-drawn, surrealist cartoon-style and bloody good with it) was influenced by the real-life suicides that have been occurring at Foxconn’s manufacturing plants – dotted around the developing nations. A report by twenty Chinese universities described Foxconn factories as labor camps and detailed widespread worker abuse and illegal overtime.
Shame on Apple for burying the issue. Earlier this year it used an affiliate TV network to whitewash, too. This is just gross. Foxconn is head-quartered in New Taipei, Taiwan, which I spent about an hour viewing in Google Streetview last night. The area seems quite impoverished and some of the factories are based in mainland China. For those who wish to understand those issues better, do not rely on what Apple tells US press to broadcast; see what’s on the ground. My wife, who is a computer scientist, worked in Taiwan for almost a year, so she knows what she saw. █
