Let me preface this first by saying that I find this entire situation to be abhorrent, and that reply by Apple's Chief Privacy Officer to be useless at best and poor at worst. However, there is a significant case for why it might not be a lie (not that it makes that statement any better, but that's beside the point).
If you look at the original source material[0] (which is a really interesting piece to read in full in general) instead of the article about it in the OP , it tries to understand the situation in much more detail than the BBC report.
And their reasonable conclusion was that Apple just grabbed that random list from somewhere or reverse engineered it from some other product, because it contains some terms in chinese that are plain weird or have no explanation, such as 5 different random names with the last name "Zhang".
The part about Canadian vs. US banlist was fairly interesting too, in terms of how The Citizen Lab analyzed the whole thing. Overall, I would count that report as a must-read. It is way more interesting and comprehensive than the BBC article about it. Not even mentioning that it goes really deep into the methodology of how the conclusions were arrived at and how those banlists were reverse-engineered.
P.S. I wish this thread was linking to the source material aka full analysis post by The Citizen Lab instead of the barebones and weak BBC article about it. It covers way more ground than just what's mentioned in the BBC article. And it is the primary source, after all.
If you look at the original source material[0] (which is a really interesting piece to read in full in general) instead of the article about it in the OP , it tries to understand the situation in much more detail than the BBC report.
And their reasonable conclusion was that Apple just grabbed that random list from somewhere or reverse engineered it from some other product, because it contains some terms in chinese that are plain weird or have no explanation, such as 5 different random names with the last name "Zhang".
The part about Canadian vs. US banlist was fairly interesting too, in terms of how The Citizen Lab analyzed the whole thing. Overall, I would count that report as a must-read. It is way more interesting and comprehensive than the BBC article about it. Not even mentioning that it goes really deep into the methodology of how the conclusions were arrived at and how those banlists were reverse-engineered.
0. https://citizenlab.ca/2021/08/engrave-danger-an-analysis-of-...
P.S. I wish this thread was linking to the source material aka full analysis post by The Citizen Lab instead of the barebones and weak BBC article about it. It covers way more ground than just what's mentioned in the BBC article. And it is the primary source, after all.