A Reddit thread has suggested that Apple’s Weather app is censoring air quality data in China when it reaches unhealthy or hazardous levels.
The Air Quality Index (AQI) rates air quality on a scale from 0 (best) to 500 (worst), with values of 151-200 rated Unhealthy, 201-300 Very Unhealthy and 301-500 Hazardous. At the Unhealthy level, people are advised to avoid strenuous outdoor activity, while all outdoor activity is best avoided at Hazardous levels.
The original poster says that the data reappears when using a VPN.
At present, it’s unclear whether the issue is a technical glitch or actual censorship. If the latter, then this could be Apple redacting the data at the request of the Chinese government, but a more likely explanation would be that the data is being withheld from Apple’s weather data source.
The Chinese government last year banned the display of air quality data from non-government sources, and has been accused of aggressive responses to the distribution of non-approved data.
Apple last year had to remove an estimated 400 VPN apps from the local App Store after the Chinese government declared non-approved VPNs illegal.
In one recent example of what the government calls “rumor mongering” by individuals, a man was detained by police for five days in Chengdu in the southwest after he warned on his Weibo microblog that the city faced its “heaviest smog in its 2,000-year history”, local media reported.
