Good lord - this is a HN only comment. Go ahead and use your phone from china with built in spyware! Or almost all android phones - never updated. Or use whatsup or facebook messenger instead of imessage.
It's increasingly clear that HN commentators pushing towards Apple's competitors don't care about privacy at all.
iPhones in China back up to a version of iCloud owned by a Chinese company that presumably shares its data with the government.
Exactly. And Chinese made phones shipped overseas (ie India) ALSO often backup to china or have links that way.
I know a lot of it is marketing, but they're certainly trying much more than competitors.
Google has enabled end to end encryption of Android backups.