"Abiding by local laws and regulations" is a veil behind which international companies hide, claiming lack of responsibility for actions that many of us would consider unethical. Just as with Yahoo's outing of Chinese dissidents[0], at some point companies in China (like Apple, now hosting iCloud data in Guizhou) are going to be forced to hand over data to the Chinese government in order to "abide by local laws". Cue the "but the NSA collects all our data, anyway" arguments..

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_...