On Jan. 10, it was reported that Apple will hand its China cloud operations over to a state-owned partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co. (GCBD) on Feb. 28. This was only meant to affect customers in mainland China, some users outside of China also received an email telling them their data was affected and being given to GCBD.
As reported by TechCrunch, Apple now says that some customers received that message in error. The tech giant has informed users that these emails were sent in error, reiterating that only users with their Apple ID country set to China will have their iCloud data migrated to GCBD servers.
China law requires companies to store customer data collected in the region locally. With the handover, photos, documents and messages uploaded by Apple users throughout the country will be stored at a data center in the southwest province of Guizhou .
Chinese iCloud customers were notified of the change and had the option to keep using the service or deactivate it by the transfer date, according to the WSJ. Apple said that over the next seven weeks it will seek to make sure customers know about the coming changes, adding that the company “has strong data-privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems.”
