The kung fu star, famous for his acting roles in the Ip Man movie series, is dressed in a black suit with a modified Apple logo on his chest, in the form of a padlock. The video was accompanied by a song with the line “don’t wander around me”.

ChatGPT app lands on iPhones, with Android version coming soon

“To safeguard the security of personal information to the greatest extent, this is very iPhone,” the ad says, with a promise that user data from FaceID, gallery and the health app “are strictly protected”.

As of Thursday, the ad had generated 100,000 views on Apple’s official WeChat page, and more than 51,000 views on Yen’s personal account on Weibo.

The campaign comes at a time when Chinese consumers are increasingly concerned about privacy and the government is implementing a new legal framework to protect data and privacy.

But Apple’s privacy-focused ad also touched on a sensitive topic in China.

While some social media users praised the ads as creative, others questioned Apple’s track record in privacy protection. In documents leaked by former CIA consultant Edward Snowden in 2013, the US National Security Agency was able to obtain direct access to data held by Google and Apple through a secret programme called Prism. At the time, Apple said it did “not provide any government agency with direct access to [its] servers”.

In 2016 Apple was criticised for refusing a request by the FBI to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the provincial government.

Some Chinese iPhone users have reportedly received smut spam via iMessage, an instant messaging service exclusive to Apple devices. An antifraud official from the public security authority in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, attributed the incidents to iCloud account leaks, according to a Wednesday report by local government-run newspaper City Link.

According to an ongoing poll by local media ITHome, 76 respondents said they trusted Apple in terms of privacy protection as of Thursday morning, versus 97 who did not.

The Chinese government has in recent years enhanced the oversight of privacy controls, issuing regulations including the Personal Information Protection Law and Data Security Law to better address the problem.

As part of Beijing’s efforts, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has named and shamed over 2,500 apps since 2019 for illegally collecting user information, requesting excessive permissions or misleading customers.

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