Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)
It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
Exactly, that's actually why I LIKE this decision so much. I'm not on Apple's side, but I REALLY like the idea that a company just says, "Fine, we'll comply by not even offering this product." It's a perfectly legitimate choice, and it FORCED Apple to evaluate the pros and cons.
I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it. I like that Apple also is refusing to just bend over to the EU. We need more of these types of conflicts so we can work out good regulations, and not just always bend over and take it from whatever party won.
While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap. I like California's method of "to sell it here you have to have this but we're not going to sue you for selling a noncompliant product elsewhere."
Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.
I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.
> Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services
It's been a while since I left Europe, and I'm rusty on that particular layer of civics. Do EU voters actually have a say in this kind of regulation? Or is it all decided on the executive side which is only accountable to member states and not to individual citizens?
It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in. Such as:
- Chat Control
- Vehicle regulations (mandates on "eCall", disturbing audio visuals and other "safety measuers) in Regulation (EU) 2018/858
- Eventual upcoming ethanol restrictions
- Ban on plastic drinking straws
- Drink caps that are stuck to the bottles
- Ban on plastics with one hand, on the other handd there are huge plastic enclosers for batteries, scissors and in countries with a "green" profiles, such as Netherlands it seems impossible to just buy one or two apples - you have to buy a emplastered six pack of apples (lots of waste if I just wanted one apple).
Maybe this is just a fantasy, but drink producers were previously responsible for their "waste". Bottlers would pick-up and recycle glass bottles, but the onus shifted completely to the consumer - first with a glass bottle deposit, then with the advent of disposable plastic containers. Glass bottles largely didn't require a straw, unlike the latest frappuccino, which generally comes with a plastic container, lid, and soggy paper straw.
Instead of banning plastic bottles or unrecyclable plastic-lined paper cups (or, as you mention, apple blister packs...what?) where the vast majority of plastic resides, we now have paper straws to deride. Each time you peel your lips off a dry paper tube, you're reminded of your personal culpability in the global waste shell game.
The only viable solution seems to be to stop consuming (see 'fantasy' in the opening line). I'm guilty as charged, BTW, but will politely decline paper straws (I have my own stash of plastic straw contraband).
I don't even know whom they try to fool (apparently, they are succeeding in many ways...), but as you mention.. they (the politicians and institutions) complain about nanoplastics, and at the same time moves towards a plastic world. It is hypocrisy of many degrees. Milk containers used to be only paper, but now they are both paper and plastic for some reason. It's hard to find drinking bottles that are glass as they most turned plastic (I do, however, choose metal before plastic due to taste).
Drinking straws.. in the super market it's now possible to buy "reusable" (Made in P.R.C) drinking straws for a really cheap price (that they are in practise, one time straws)..
the idea was to have less of those things people buy and consum on the way and throw them away and the wind puts them put of the trash and now shitload of plastic everywhere ....
i switch between clean beaches in europe to cigarrete and plastic straw infested ones on other parts of the world.
As a european i like thos clean beaches etc
Have to say I love the drink cap thing. It makes a lot of sense. The caps wind up everywhere so the regulation probably/most likely does some good (have not seen any data so who knows). But once you get used to it you appreciate not being able to lose the cap. Straws seem pretty useless to me in general so why not avoid plastic? but that is probably a me problem. Plastic on fruit is annoying as hell but it is not a mutually exclusive problem.
If you don't personally find straws useful that's fine but why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens?
To make matters worse the expected environmental impact is miniscule and the entire thing is predicated on a popular misconception that gained virality. It's a perfect example of the government failing to function well.
Is that really a perfect example of a government failing to function well? In what country government does every action require a direct vote? Representative democracy is by definition imperfect.
Bet you can think of a better “perfect” example of a government failing to function well. It all depends on which government you are referring to but the best example to me would probably be a government needlessly bombing another country. Not a ban on plastic straws.
Who said anything about a direct vote for every action? You're putting words in my mouth.
Yes, I think it's a particularly good example of government dysfunction. The issue itself is simple enough to easily make sense of and it's clear that it's a suboptimal outcome. The regulator should obviously not be getting caught up in nonsensical hype.
Don't confuse impact of the described action with quality as an example. The best examples of mathematical concepts are usually not particularly useful for anything in the real world.
> If you don't personally find straws useful that's fine but why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens?
That is cleary advocating for something as small straws being worthy of a direct vote.
Is there a reasonable expectation for government to be mathematically optimal in any possible way? Why should I not confuse your example as an example?
>"why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens"
Not the user you were replying to, but they clearly asked why it was done at high-level, and without a vote; you are completely focusing on the latter, and ignoring the former.
I am not sure I agree with that comment, but you shouldn't straw-man it.
Don't know where you get your apples but I can buy 1 if I want. Just not at the supermarket since they optimise to sell you more than you need. No regulation involved here.
I believe it was both in Albert and Aldi (during 2023). Felt really awkward to waste fruit, but that's nice that there are sanity among other stores. I get it that folks can be annoyed when I hand pick my potatoes at the grocery store to match for size and to have good coloured exemplars, but to pick and choose is one of the few delights buy groceries.
The ideal solution for all this is would be what the Japanese have: a population trained to just throw garbage in the bin instead of on the ground. I don't think I've heard any politician who is even considering measures to get there. He would get my vote.
> It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in.
Well... your government certainly has a say in Brussels. Often enough, national politicians use "Brussels" as a scapegoat... nothing can happen in Brussels if national governments (or the Commission) don't propose it first, the Parliament has no right to initiative.
If people would stop electing dumb fucks to national governments or to at least hold their dumb fucks in national governments accountable (yes, it is possible, even Hungary managed to do so), you'd get a lot less "Brussels" bullshit.
(And yes, I am aware, this statement is particularly ironic given I'm German and we were utterly infamous for shipping off utter wastes of space to Brussels)
> and in countries with a "green" profiles, such as Netherlands it seems impossible to just buy one or two apples - you have to buy a emplastered six pack of apples (lots of waste if I just wanted one apple).
That's a Dutch specialty. Here in Germany, I can buy single apples, pears, bananas or whatever just fine if I want - although I don't because apples suck.
If I were to guess, it's a logistics thing. Sixpacks of apples are easier to handle and transport than a bunch of loose apples.
Not sure where you live in the Netherlands, but where I live we have plenty of places where you can buy single pieces of fruit. Maybe it changes per supermarket.
They do have a say. They can elect representatives who could change the legal framework and the incentives for the bureaucrats, or even remove the ability of the bureaucrats to regulate certain things. Then these regulations would not get passed and that would be that.
We have a say at a 4th level of derived decision, which is 2 levels more than what people call a democracy. Also, the other political party will do it too.
= We don’t have a say. We voted NO to the new EU treaties in 2008 and the new president decided that electing him meant that we approved the same treaties.
The lower chamber of parliament that votes on the regulation is directly elected and can rewrite and amend proposals. The higher chamber (EU Council) is comprised from government (or state?) heads which are either directly of indirectly elected with a length of 1. The commission (executive branch) that drafts the laws that are amended and passed by the parliament is voted in by a parliament which is directly elected.
Where do you get 4th level of deriviation exactly?
But MEPs can't even introduce legislation, they have to get all of Parliament to ask the European Commission to initiate legislation, and the Commissioners are pretty far removed from direct election. Nobody elected by the citizens can initiate legislation.
Not sure what other mechanism would be possible for creating a rule system like the DMA presuming that the EU countries remain independent. Treaties are too slow, and direct democracy on an issue this complicated is the realm of science fiction (see Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe for a take on this -- particularly the Demarchist faction).
Tons of people have died for a variety of causes throughout human history. It does not mean that the causes were not silly or deluded. (e.g religious wars, Communism, Fascism etc.)
Carlin didn’t say it was silly, he said it didn’t matter. Religion, communism, fascism were all world-defining ideas, and they very much mattered to those who fought for them and against them. What am I saying, “mattered”. Go check social media, they matter right now.
They cannot. The EU Parliament cannot pass, change or repeal laws. Its representatives can't represent.
If you mean elect national representatives, then the EU treaties were deliberately written to only give them one option - exit entirely and be trade sanctioned by the others as a result, who must obey constitutionally even if it's self harm and they don't want to do it.
The EU is designed from the ground up to look slightly democratic from a distance without actually being so. Ordinary people living and working in member states have zero influence over these kinds of regulations which is why stuff like the DMA doesn't reflect their actual legislative priorities, which according to polls for a long time are primarily economic and immigration related, sometimes climate.
If you look at how the political class treated Brexit, you can see why it's so hard to influence these decisions.
If it's not in the EU parliaments jurisdiction, it's in the EU council's. As a rule, all members states have to be democratic and you can simply vote out your EU council member i.e. your head of state. It is democratic.
The EU Councils decisions are taken in secret. You have no idea if it's democratic or not, nor does it matter even if they do hold a vote because by convention none of them ever campaign on the decisions they make there.
To see this, try and find out how Ursula von der Leyen ended up the most powerful woman in Europe. What qualified her for that, who were the alternative candidates considered, what was said during the debate and by whom.
You can't because the entire process was secret from end to end. Was she even voted on? Nobody knows.
Again, the EU is designed to pass itself off as democratic without being so. But so is China.
Ah but look closely at those votes - do you see anything strange about them? Anything at odds with the idea that they are being cast by directly elected heads of government based on national policy programmes?
Edit: Nevermind, I'll be more direct.
What you linked to isn't the European Council that has elected heads of state in it. It's the votes of the Council of the European Union. Yes, this naming choice is astoundingly stupid, and because it's never been fixed despite many decades of confusion there are many who speculate the confusion is deliberate. It creates exactly the kind of false appearance of democracy that's tripped you up here.
The European Council, the one with Macron, Merz, etc in it, doesn't publish anything about their decision making process. There probably aren't votes. They don't approve or disapprove laws, either. Officially they decide things by consensus. Unofficially nobody knows because they all swear each other to secrecy.
The laws are approved by the Council of the European Union who are, theoretically, still ministers from the different governments i.e. a vote on a trade law would have trade ministers. In reality, that's not how it works either. You can easily verify it. Here's a random law that got approved recently by the 'democratic' parts of the system, on "the welfare of dogs and cats and their traceability":
1. Why does dog welfare have to be imposed on members via transnational law they can't change?
2. Why are nearly all the votes of the Council passing with 95%+ support, all the time? Aren't they supposed to be from different political parties in different countries?
3. Is it really plausible that elected trade ministers from all over Europe travelled somewhere, met and had a meaningful debate about dog welfare?
The answers are respectively:
1. It doesn't and shouldn't.
2. Because they aren't real votes.
3. https://agenceurope.eu/en/bulletin/article/13873/27/eu-counc... says "The EU Council adopted the regulation ... without debate." (note the same naming confusion in the EU's own websites - they use "EU Council" to mean the body that approves laws, which isn't the body made up of heads of state that calls itself the European Council).
This law was waved through by some low level civil servants on behalf of the ministers. Probably neither group even read it. As is true for almost all EU law: most of the work is done by lobbyists.
So, when people tell you the EU is a democracy because of the Council, think about that. Or just ask them which council they mean, because they probably don't know themselves. Fun fact: there's also the Council of Europe which isn't connected to the EU at all.
You're correct on me posting the wrong link sorry. Thank you for the detailed reply.
But I disagree slightly with your take on the secrecy thing. Many of those discussions are diplomatic or internal administration. It is normal for these things to be kept private even in domestic governments. As it can put the state at a disadvantage to have the matters disclosed publicly (the state acts on behalf of the people).
There seems to definitely be shortcomings in transparency however on legislative debates like you mention, and should atleast have a period of public consultation on all of them. Also the presidency sets the talking points and just ignore legislative proposals they don't like.
It is democratic but yes I 100% agree it's entirely open for abuse, and I'm sadly sure is being abused. Separately and unrelated, imo lobbyists should not feature on the system at all.
Legislative matters are supposedly not secret and appointments can be (whether it's wrong or right is a bit grey imo, and that isn't a good thing).
1. The European Council
The European Council primarily decisions by consensus. However, where the EU treaties specify a formal vote, certain appointments allow for or require a secret ballot.
When it is used: Secret votes are strictly reserved for specific appointments or personnel decisions, most notably the election of the President of the European Council.
Legal Basis: Article 4(4) of the Rules of Procedure of the European Council states that a secret ballot shall be held if requested by any member of the European Council supported by a simple majority.
2. The Council of the European Union
Because the Council of the European Union acts as a legislative body, its operations are bound by strict transparency requirements under the Treaty of Lisbon.
Legislative Debates: When the Council deliberates or votes on a draft legislative act, the meeting must be public, and voting records are made visible. Secret votes are prohibited for legislative matters.
Non-Legislative/Administrative Matters: Secret ballots are permitted only for specific appointments or selections to individual positions (such as nominating members of the European Central Bank Executive Board or Court of Auditors) if a member state requests it and the decision receives majority support to proceed secretly.
And dog welfare being across borders make sense legally (single market) and ethically.
It's a constitutional fact. The most they can do is propose amendments to laws proposed by the Commission, but the Commission drives the whole process and isn't required to accept them (worst case, they just cancel the law and then try again later).
There is literally nobody you can vote for to if you want to repeal the DMA.
You get to vote for one of ~5 alternatives every 4 years. This then propagates to hundreds of decisions in a way that dilutes your influence to practically nothing.
Yup, but laws have to be approved by the EU parliament and that's not just a formality. As I said, I do think it is valid to critizise that system, but what you stated is plain wrong and even when I pointed it out you wouldn't admit it.
You have anything to back up that claim, or is it just knee-jerk drivel with no evidence based on your feelings and distrust of scary government bureaucrats?
And how is that different from any other governmental level? Seriously, we in Berlin got a freeway that nobody I know wanted or wants. It's not the EU's fault.
I think you mean DMA, not DMCA. DMCA mostly protects copyright holders. DMA is about protecting users and competitors from platform lock-in. Bending for Apple would just make that lock-in harder to challenge.
DMCA provides some rather important protection for service providers (including small-scale services like web forums, not just ISPs and web hosts) - it makes them not liable for copyright violations by their users, so long as they take down infringing content upon receipt of a DMCA notice.
Precisely. What it replaced was rightsholders suing web services (like a forum or web host) as a first resort, which was a much more cumbersome and painful process for all parties.
> If it was more painful for the suing party, it was a good thing.
It's a lot easier for a large plaintiff - like a record label, a movie studio, or a software publisher - to file a lawsuit than it is for a small defendant like a web site operator to defend against one.
I totally agree cookie banners are awful, but you could equally lay the blame at the foot of website owners who are so keen to track your movements across the web that they'll layer this awful UX on their users. No tracking cookies => no cookie banners.
Yes, European Commission decides the laws. Then a “trilogue” negotiation happens between the Commission, MPs, and EU government representatives, but the MPs don't hold the pen on the final wording (Commission does).
MPs can't therefore repeal laws; they can at most ask the Commission to set themes on the program. The Commission is therefore strongly dominant, as it is composed of career unelected officials who can wait for a compliant Parliament to pass the laws they want and target MPs in negotiations. This is what they do with ChatControl.
Of course there are no checks and balances for the Commission officials, who are bureaucrats with an opaque agenda. The EU is a weak form of democracy, which is geared toward bureaucratic capture and legal inflation.
It's a bit complicated to feed more stability into the system, but then this gets hijacked by national governments as an excuse to never take any blame for any shit that follows. Everything good is us, sovereign entities and all that is bad is always the other people in Brussels. Even zo the people in Brussels are mostly deputies of the same people or just themselves, but 26x.
It's not true, the Parliament can't choose the laws it has to vote on. All negotiations are done behind closed doors, in a truly democratic and transparent manner, that allows us to lecture the rest of the world on how to govern.
The parliament can't choose the laws that are submitted, but it can and does change the text of it all the time. I don't think the actual discussions are ever public in any other modern democratic body anyways.
This isn't exactly true. They can't propose but they can amend. The final text has to be agreed by the commission, the lower chamber (the parliament) and the higher chamber (the council, which is heads of states).
I'd argue the average EU citizen has absolutely no idea how any of the Brussels bullshit works in reality. We learned it in school once, very briefly, just long enough to learn it is a clusterfuck of chambers. We are told it is democratic, and that's it. Once you get older, all you hear is: Brussels forbids this, forbids that. The EU is ripe for disruption.
As EU voter, I couldn't care less that Apple behaves like a spoiled brat when it comes to following laws it doesn't like, it is one customer they will never get.
I only use Apple hardware that is project assigned to me, my household is Apple free.
In fact, this applies to every single company that thinks they should control governments and not the other way around.
That's not exactly how I would summarize the current moment in time.
This OP article doesn't really go into it, but they did actually propose a solution to the divide, they just needed more time to develop it. The Reuters article is reporting on one person's response to the proceedings, which involve more details than this particular article covers.
For instance:
> To address those concerns, Apple designed a system called Trusted System Agent, an intermediary that would let competing virtual assistants safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI on EU devices. Apple also proposed launching Siri AI in Europe while rolling out the Trusted System Agent gradually over 18 months. The European Commission rejected both proposals, and according to Apple, did not agree to any alternative.
That only reinforces my argument. Apple could have waited, but they decided to go ahead now and bring it to the EU later when they can address the concerns. That's great, that's the law working.
Jurisdiction concept is not strictly bound by territory. Classic example is two parties based in two jurisdiction dealing with each other somehow.
Imagine there is a law in your jurisdiction saying if you hire a person there are rules A, B, C which are a bit inconvenient to you, the employer. What if you incorporate in a different jurisdiction where the salaries are higher but there are no rules B and C, but there are rules B and D. Then this incorporated entity offers to hire people in your jurisdiction, but not offer the higher salaries of the other one.
Which rules should apply? The answer, as usual, is -- "it depends".
GDPR also applies to companies that provide services to EU citizens, no matter where the company is based.
This makes a lot of sense, because otherwise you'd get situations where Multi Corp X could claim, "Oh, but our Berlin office is actually offering this service hosted in Kiribati. We just happen to have German users" and not offer access to personal data.
Seen as enforcement is through fines, companies that do not have an EU presence are completely unaffected. So even if technically true, in practice claiming that there's global reach is false. Concretely, no one is going after a hypothetical Baton Rouge Herald for not providing an opt-out of data harvesting on their news website.
I know about that. These situations are logical, if you'd ask me. The OP suggested EU law works where all parties involved are outside EU. Like EU playing world police, or something.
> And as a consumer, I am somewhat happy that a company says "well, then not" if it cannot comply with the law.
As a citizen, I find it both fascinating and disturbing that this is even a thing. Of course companies have to follow the law. Why is this even a thing? If the product fills a real need and the externalities are acceptable, that will be a demonstration that the law needs an update.
Yes. If a company in another country elects not to deliver a product or feature because of local regulations, consumers should take that up with their local legislators. That company has no obligation to sell something just because local consumers want it. And if those consumers want to bypass local regulations in some manner, that's their business.
Totally agree. Granting exemptions feels like trying to have their cake and eat it too. If regulations mean anything they need to be enforced so we can see the real downstream effects.
> I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it.
The idea that there is such a thing as "law-breaking products" when consumers ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO SPEND THEIR MONEY ON THEM is insane to me. This is authoritarian nonsense.
It is not the state's place to tell people what they should or should not be allowed to buy.
> The idea that there is such a thing as "law-breaking products" when consumers ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO SPEND THEIR MONEY ON THEM is insane to me. This is authoritarian nonsense.
Remember Silk Road? You could order cocaine, heroin, and even execution contracts, which the founder himself go caught doing. I don't think making something illegal to buy is authoritarian nonsense. I don't want people ordering a murder on me from Uber Hits.
> It is not the state's place to tell people what they should or should not be allowed to buy.
You will always find people willing to spend money on anything. The whole point of politics is that we have to draw a line between what people want to do and the effect that it can have on other people. To put it simply, if your freedom affects mine, then someone needs to decide how far you can go and how much I have to accept.
We commonly accept that scams are bad, even though someone might participate willingly, just because it is much more likely that someone is taken advantage of in a way that most people find immoral, for example. Even in bastions of free speech such as the US. That someone somewhere knowingly gave money to someone else is neither here nor there.
The most extreme example would be child prostitution or child porn, in my opinion.
But I guess it would be authoritarian to deny people from purchasing such services/items???
You should remember that according to a court testimony the whole European area (which goes beyond EU) gives Apple 7% of their revenue, whereas breaking DMCA may incur penalties of ups to 10% of global turnover.
Those numbers make withholding "risky" products a no-brainer strategy. Also, those numbers put a hard limit of how much Apple will want reevaluate their general strategy of tightly integrated first-party software.
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.
To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering.
I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.
> If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them
This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration.
The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bickering.
If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me
The EU isn't asking for more privacy. This is about interoperability and competition. They don't like Apple controlling the AI interface and want a portal. They want Apple to put a backdoor into their system to allow third parties to access the data. This is insanely difficult to do while maintaining Apple's super-strict (yay!) privacy policy.
> If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere.
Those are not equivalent statements. You're assuming that privacy is a one-dimensional quantity, so that anything that complies with "the strictest international privacy laws" automatically also complies with any other privacy laws. But this is not actually true. It can easily be the case that every national law allows some set of behavior (different sets for different legal systems), at the same time that the intersection of all those sets is empty.
How does that reflect poorly (or positively) on their privacy chops? The dispute is about a competition law, a law Apple is complying with by withholding this feature.
Its because the standard product development strategy is to get the product into the hands of users to determine value and iterate based on feedback.
The EU has rules that are expensive to implement correctly, so if you want early feedback from users, you release elsewhere first. It's a very rational way to approach it.
Apple's concern is at the intersection of DMA and privacy. Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of data access that Apple has today would create privacy issues. This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple", but that would be less profitable, but would have prevented the request for an exception because Apple would be on an equal footing with everyone else, if all they could see was client-encrypted data indistinguishable from random bytes.
That's the crux of my point; Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model and/or considered user data to be a liability rather than a hook for service subscriptions.
> The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)
I don't consider this to be a problem, but the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly.
> Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model
Consumer-centered threat model is perfectly well served with on-device models and Private Cloud. What isn’t is interoperability.
> the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly
I agree. And at the end of the day, Apple is following the law. I am sympathetic to their position, however, that this isn’t something worth building and optimizing for at launch. If we wanted to be rose tinted, EU consumers will get a fully-baked product. (EU developers get somewhat screwed, but I suppose their offshore offices could start.)
> This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration
This kind of approach is how startups justify everything, however for established companies this would be backward.
I get a feeling that Apple never wanted to do it. They already knew the compliance requirements existed and if they would have wanted to test things then the narrative could have that they are rolling out in other markets first and would roll out with compliance in EU later. Asking for exemption was a bet they tried to play here, they lost and now spinning the narrative.
Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick a public fight with the regulator or legislator in question.
Just imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols delaying the market release of some of their models. Apple really is behaving in a very unusual way here.
And even though I don't like the implication of this (the law should not disadvantage anyone purely for being critical of it), I can't help but wonder how many fewer pages the DMA would be if Apple had engaged with its predecessors in good faith instead.
> imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols
Both of these happen. European banks complain about American securities law. And all manner of car makers delay releasing vehicles in America and the EU.
Yet. But they are probably working with Chinese partners (including the government) on releasing something (maybe with Alibaba models instead of Google models, on a Chinese-local cloud rather than google cloud).
A quick check showed it is estimated that Apple gets about 18% of it's profits from China but only maybe 7% from EU countries (ignore Apple's definition of Europe!).
Maybe China is easier to work with - perhaps their rules are made clearer?
China has 1.4 billion people and they are rapidly increasing their wealth. The only surprising factor is that Chinese cell phone producers haven't eaten up apple's marketshare yet.
I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.
> complying with all kinds of laws delays release in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct?
DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.
Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.
> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always
Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)
No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either. Ultimately it’s about the weight you can throw as well as PR. Probably easier for Apple to make the EU look bad and drag their feet on it. I imagine they’re still not thrilled about the Lightening->USB-C change
Apple was literally the first major company to go all-in on USB-C. They shipped entire devices that only had USB-C ports.
If anything, I would wager they were happy about it. They were going to have to do it anyway, and it would inevitably cause friction for users who were already invested in Lightning cables and third-party devices. The EU forcing this just meant they could shift the blame for any negative sentiment onto the EU.
They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.
Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.
We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.
If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.
When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.
So win-win. EU consumers get a fully-baked, slower-rolled-out product. American consumers and developers get to see it earlier, warts and opportunities and all.
Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?
The point is complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere. Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
> Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it.
> complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere.
Oh no! Anyway...
Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product. That seems to be gone these days and end-users have garbage products as a result.
If, like me, you specifically do not want third parties inside the Apple ecosystem, Apple has done a great job. I totally hate the EU's insistence of tearing down Apple's walled garden. That is a huge reason I like their products so much.
Interoperability only requires Apple to allow third parties to have the same capabilities that Apple does on your device. It doesn't require you to purchase or use a third party service or device. It merely allows you to have that choice in the first place.
> Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it
It makes sense if you’re prioritizing time to market and agility. Once you’ve nailed down your product, you can make it compliant for more-onerous jurisdictions. You see this in finance all the time, where the U.S. tends to have the tightest rules around e.g. betting and crypto.
> Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product
Because software shipped in a box. Also, compliance is orthogonal to how good a product is. Siri AI might be crap. It might be great. It might be almost perfect and then made great on second release. Everything slows down if the entire development process has to deal with open APIs and lawyers at every turn.
It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
> It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
It's also perfectly legitimate to legally require business to slow the fuck down and consider how the thing will be used or abused, to make the product not crash for even just basic usages, and to put real safeguards in place against problematic scenarios.
But no, move fast and break things wins the day every day in the US.
Whatever Apple is cooking and however long its taken them, the DMA is not a surprise and they could well have been taking it into account from the very beginning.
These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality. The rest of the world will be happy to not allow third parties access to our data.
As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began,
If it were the case, Apple would just say it (with receipts).
> I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality.
As a European Apple user I am absolutely OK with not having these functionalities, which I am 100% sure would not even work as advertised given the company track record.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
The DMA was substantially finalised by 2020, and came into force in 2023. Apple's AI thing was developed with the full knowledge that it existed. The issue isn't personal data here (that'd be the GDPR, and maybe to some extent the AI Act). The DMA is about _competition_. The EU's issue here is that Apple is giving its own AI thing a level of access unavailable to other vendors' AI things, I'd assume.
> As a small developer
You are not covered by the DMA. You'd need an EEA turnover of 7.5bn and/or a market cap of 75bn, for a start. And you'd also need to be a _platform_. The DMA only really applies to a few companies.
AS we all have complained, Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for, roughly speaking, forever. Their private compute cloud thing and the protocols that protect it have, I bet, been in place for years. That's what you are missing.
The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.
> one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets
At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
> At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
I totally agree with you in principle here, but Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here (and in the other cases, like Mac mirroring) so I honestly don't see that happening at all.
This is purely a lobbying move against the EU to get EU citizens/politicians to complain about the laws and get an exemption.
And to be fair, Apple's business model is currently structurally incompatible with a lot of the DMA (which I personally think is a good thing), so they kinda have to fight it for a while.
It doesn't _have_ to stop - the features just can't ship in the EU while these requirements are in place, which is exactly what is happening here. The law is working as intended, just not in the way the proponents thought it would.
It can be more than one thing. It’s a lobbying move, to be sure. But it’s also almost certainly a time-to-market and potentially cost-mitigation play, too.
I do take your general point here, but if you know you need to implement the DNA requirements then you need to build and plan for some of that well in advance of launch.
I guess I don't see how much time they gain unless they don't plan to ever release a DMA compliant version.
Having worked at Apple and similarly giant companies, the idea that "they have enough money to do it" is incredibly naive. Rewriting all the basic software primitives of the iPhone, or the Mac, or iCloud, or CloudKit, or choose whatever massive surface area this legislation impacts, is not a matter of simply spending enough. Doing so requires the time and attention of the very few subject matter experts who are able to competently do it. The true cost is to your strategy, your business plan, and your product roadmap.
So it becomes a purely business decision: Do we risk a 10% global revenue penalty to release this globally, do we release this everywhere the DMA does not apply, or do we simply not build it? And make no mistake, even if Apple moved heaven and earth to try to comply with DMA they are STILL RISKING the full 10% penalty if the EU decides against them.
Didn’t write “money”, wrote “resources”, but sure.
Yes, there’s a risk to releasing a product whenever you can be held accountable for that product. I understand that Apple seeks to be as unaccountable as possible.
So we ultimately agree with one another: Apple can do it, but doesn’t want to, for various reasons.
It's simply a prioritizing time to market over a global release. You tend to release into the most restrictive environments last and the most forgiving environments first, for obvious reasons.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.
Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.
There wouldn't need to be a redo if the products had been built with compliance in mind. This law isn't something new; it's been around for years now. Not taking it into account from the beginning with the intention of operating in the jurisdiction means there's definitely intention to skirt. Particularly given the previous issues in the same department.
No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would successfully fight the law in court, if they thought consumers would revolt, if they thought that they were a Special Squirrel who would get exemption, or whatever.
Does this put them stupidly behind schedule? Yes, and bummer for them, but I highly doubt that a company as politically savvy, legally savvy, and wealthy as Apple would do this "by mistake".
I wouldn’t want to try and develop a sandbox for an AI that could protect the user and yet still be useful. Having an AI act on your private data but only in the way you want is hard enough when it’s a model that you control on hardware you own. Having third parties running AI on your private data requires a level of trust that I wouldn’t want in the hands of random developers in the app store.
It’s not an enormous effort if you plan for it. They clearly knew about this, and could’ve afforded to plan for it. Their whole shtick is locking users in, and DMA is their nemesis.
> completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc
So Google chose to be evil, now they have to rip all the evil out and redo it from scratch. Can't say I have any sympathy. Should have done the right thing from the start.
Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones?
Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late.
Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.
Appples architecture prevents them from seeing customers data (see Private Cloud Compute documentation). Data that Gemini Assistant (not referring to the distilled version Apple uses) see goes straight to Google. Big difference here.
Weird to say it but the only assistant with any guarantee for privacy by design is Siri at the moment.
That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.
I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.
And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.
I was referring to Google Gemini AI (their branding is horrible) - Google can see ALL of your interactions with their services - that's not what Apple gets to see
If the options are "launch in the rest of the world quickly and get to the EU later" or "launch everywhere at once years after the competition" PMs and execs are going to choose the latter every time.
I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
The third option is: launch in a way that is compliant with EU rules everywhere. Except they don't want that as they want to retain their outsized market power.
Apple is just being the usual Apple being both an hardware vendor and giving it's own software advantages that competitors don't have and using the security bogus argument as always.
And yet, people believe that crap and jump into defending Apple as if being an Apple user is their identity, sad.
But read the article, the EU wants even tighter integration for third parties, so it’s not exactly like Google is out of the woods regarding the DMA and this.
Some features don't land in Europe because US companies can't handle the amount of languages. For them it is English and maybe Spanish or Chinese because they don't care how heybmake money.
I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith.
Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.
Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.
But EU has a pretty uniform laws, so this comes to just one issue: time.
Did Apple start working on this feature before EU implemented the law? This might be the case, but even if it was after, they could start working on implementing that sooner.
It would be good for US companies to know that EU laws are not "guidelines", just as US enforces their laws on companies from outside.
Sure but we're talking about the unified law of almost an entire wealthy continent here. It's EU ffs. Not some small island country in the middle of the ocean.
This looks to me like yet another bet from Apple: "they'll buy iPhones anyway, let them wait".
Because of move fast and break things mentality. Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights, they would have reached nowhere.
> Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights
Bad comparison. Launching with GDPR compliance isn’t particularly taxing if you’re already complying with California’s CCPA. (You need your twenty-eight EU law firms on retainer, but the big firms package that conveniently.)
Copyright theft in AI, on the other hand, is a global phenomenon.
DMA is most akin to the U.S. system of designating financial institutions SIFIs and then putting a bunch of extra requirements on them. Almost intentionally onerous. Hence ringfenced to select large companies.
The DMA has nothing to do with Privacy - it's an anti-competition scheme. Apple is saying that privacy is baked in to their approach, and they can't ensure that if they allow every other AI provider the same level of access.
Core not, but here it is. Apple designed the system in a way that the operator can invade your privacy. So if only Apple is the operator it is "OK", but if they allow other operators it is not.
The truth is very often that it is long and hard not to do the work to comply but how to not comply or do complicated things to abuse of loophole despite being able to pass the law on the letter of it.
Especially in the case of apple or Google.
Look at the app store situation. It is very straightforward to do the work for the whole thing to be open to any competitor. But it is hard to try to design and implement a solution to try to not break any regulations but still manage to keep users captive the maximum without having competitor entering our walled garden.
Yes, but also its much cheaper to build it in at the very start.
When we built pervert glasses research platform, if we'd just ignored the data privacy laws we could have built it much quicker. But, the only reason it took extra time is because
1) we had no idea what we were doing and
2) the lawyers had even less idea, so we had to do a bunch of reading and make a best guess.
Turns out the guesses were right, but it was painful getting the lawyers to understand.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Then you should have done it right the first time.
Exactly, and the prupose of these legislation was supposed to be exactly that : force companies to integrate privacy in the core of their products, not to create a list of items to tick.
Agreed, unless you specifically know how a regulator will interpret a broad requirement on a edge case it’s a lot of effort to even figure out what the plan is, much less implement it.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
What if I tell you that there's a surprisingly simple, straightforward and above all very cheap solution: don't implement privacy-invading or anti-competitive features in the first place ;)
Sure let me wave a magic wand and have a data center that can meet all these regulations materialize before us. Yes I'm sure every American tech company is tripping over themselves rushing to build data centers that are subject to European taxes and regulations for the exact same compute.
Well if your product wasn't already basically spyware, it wouldn't be so much work to abide by privacy regulation frameworks, now would it? I have no sympathy for how hard it is for surveillance companies to adapt their exploitative business model to the EU.
So? It's also more effort to work everyday to earn a living than simply stealing what you need from your neighbors at gunpoint. But the law's the law.
As a European I'm conflicted because I think this particular set of privacy laws are overreaching bordering on stupid; but "exemptions" for one of the richest corporations on earth would be beyond absurd and infinitely worse.
Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.
DMA is about competition not privacy. Apple has privacy concerns with complying related to 3rd party access to customer data.
Another aspect here is that even if Apple tries theirto best to comply, the EU could decide they didn’t do a good enough job and fine them 10% of global revenue. Honestly Apple just might not want to take that risk.
Not quite.
It is up to Apple to design a system in which operators (even Apple) can't see your data. Apparently they designed it in a way that operator can see it (so it is cool if it is Apple, but not cool if it is someone else).
And Apple Intelligence supports just a fraction of languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, and Korean.
Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish have quite small populations compared Poland, while I don't see Polish there (37M). I also don't see Romanian, it is slightly bigger amount of people than Netherlands, and the rest from that list are ~< 10M.
Oh, well, at least I don't see Russian in that list.
With ChatGPT, or Claude.ai (or Deepseek, or local models) I can speak with languages that are outside of (traditionally) limited set of Apple. Because it all depends on what is on the web and web has magnitude larger set of languages compared to what Apple provides.
No, this is unrelated from privacy. The issue is that the EU won’t allow the new Siri because Apple isn’t willing to open up the system enough for 3rd party AI agents to get the same functionality.
Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.
> It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
Apple made it sound like their proposal for that was rejected by the EU. And it would be consistent with previous regulatory decisions by the EU for them to not want Apple to be setting the rules for how third-party interoperability partners/competitors ensure privacy.
It seems to me that the EU has a preference for protecting privacy with legal mechanisms, and generally doesn't approve of Apple's attempts to protect privacy with technical mechanisms because that inevitably limits interoperability with systems that aren't designed around the same restrictions and assumptions.
I’m sure they love it when Apple says, “Well… they COULD give us their models to put in private compute, but we’re not paying them for that and they’re not getting any more data than we get, ourselves. Which is exactly none.”
Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?
For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.
Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?
It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.
Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.
EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.
Uhm no, EU privacy laws are actually pretty simple: do not collect data you don't need without asking consent from a user first.
Which should IMO be the basic principle worldwide. But unfortunately in many countries, companies are more powerful than governments/regulators, so they get to grab everything they can get their hands on.
Do you think this is a problem with the EU? I don't. I think it's a problem in the way that Big Tech operates: by function of theft and laundering of data, and by screwing end-users and consumers in favor of profits.
It may be a problem with EU regulations. It’s hard to see how Apple could be certain they had complied with the EU DMA law, given its based on vague outcomes rather than clear requirements with extremely large penalties. The fact the EU was only willing to require the DMA regulations be met by large foreign companies doesn’t inspire confidence.
And it’s not like there is a thriving tech ecosystem of successful EU tech companies showing how it’s done. So there is a lot of ambiguity on how companies can reasonably comply without huge risk of 10% global revenue.
As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met.
In this case it looks much simpler: Apple strictly does not want to open up the iOS platform to other competing agents, as they lose the monopolistic moat if they do. While making a true developer platform with good documentation is often hard and expensive, with the market access they'd get, companies would gladly jump on it even if it was badly documented as long as they have guarantees of continued legal access.
At the same time, this potentially opens up the entire worldwide market (imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork), and they probably made the estimation that keeping EU out is still better value (70% of the market all to themselves) than fair competition in the 100% of the market (I guess they estimate they might get less than 70% in that case).
Or they are hoping that EU customers will want Siri AI enough to campaign for a change, but I'd find that highly unlikely.
> imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork
That's not the case. it's merely software (exactly like my iPhone 16 lacking the promised AI features claimed at WWDC24).
Anyway as I'm now within the EU with phone I bought before moving to the EU, regional features (or restrictions) depends on the logged in account and device regional settings. Except physical considerations (eSIM design, actual radio transceivers). The hardware is the same thank god.
Those requirements are explicitly on the outcomes because companies like Apple used to abuse loopholes in previous, non-outcome defined laws. They, as always, have no one to blame but themselves.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that because the legislature can’t anticipate how companies will abuse loopholes, they sidestep that by outlining the outcomes instead.
The issue I have with that approach is that I don’t agree with that approach to governance. I believe it’s incumbent on the regulator to define what is acceptable vs. disallowed in unambiguous terms.
This is a spirit of the law vs letter of the law debate. Europe in general (i know its not that easy) tends to go more towards Spirit of the Law. While the US usualy tends more to letter of the law.
A lot of regulation is legally defined in terms of outcomes. That in itself isn't unusual. Checklists of technical requirements are almowt always a derivative and a suggestion about a safe path to meet the regulated outcome. This is how "blessed" standards for e.g. medical devices work. This shields the laws themselves from overly technical discussions.
The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.
That’s a good point. So maybe another point of divergence here is that the outcomes of the DMA are rooted in inherently unpredictable market interactions, whereas a medical device standard depends on the device performance and characteristics.
I don’t think it makes sense to create an accountability framework for a company that requires the cooperation of the market, because I think companies should be in a position to either comply or be held accountable on their own merits
The intent matters, not the letter of the law. No loopholes, no bad faith interpretation. Just do what the law wants from you, if you make a mistake in good faith, you'll be given leeway to fix it.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
> but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met
This is true of most things that involve legal. Laws are not code, in basically any jurisdiction they are subject to interpretation, and just because you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, doesn't mean an enterprising enforcement agency won't still come after you
The criticism reads like people who don't understand a high trust society - which I don't think is actually the case here, more like assuming that the foreign guys are bad guys.
"They really don't try to fuck you over if you engage with them in good faith?"
Apple might not want to risk 10% of their global revenue on whether EU regulators like the outcome of their compliance efforts. And there isn’t any real risk of an EU based startup competing in this space like there would be in China.
Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily.
But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
Maybe it's more because the privacy is largely marketing and helps with continuously shutting out competitors under the guise of privacy?
If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups [1] by default and not just when ADP is enabled, which only a small subset of users do. In fact, many technical people I know don't even realize that iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted. At any rate, this large hole opens a lot of data (including iMesssage) open to Apple, law enforcement, etc.
Apple is one of the few tech companies that puts user privacy first, and any claims otherwise are deeply misguided. They pioneered things like iCloud Private Relay and privacy protecting cloud backups for devices.
Ironically the gaps you point to are things they have had to do to appease the European Union.
> They pioneered things like iCloud Private Relay and privacy protecting cloud backups for devices.
They didn't pioneered it, they just brought it to the masses. Tor was here before the Private Relay, and most open source backup applications offer E2EE out-of-the-box.
It's incredible how people are acutely aware how technically inept regulators are (laws affecting their personal use of technology) and how quickly they side with regulators when a law affects how corporations use/create technology.
If regulators suck at understanding tech, they are making poorly thought out laws for corporations just as much as they are for you.
Respectfully, it sounds like you just haven't dealt with any significant tax or regulatory tasks.
There's entire industries of experts who work on these tasks, and they don't just work for people trying to skirt the rules. I've hired people for both tasks and the reason was specifically to comply.
NIST, MS, and the security community all recommend against forcing people to change their passwords on fixed intervals. They should only be changed when there is an indication they have been compromised.
PCI requirements demand mandatory 30 day rotation intervals on user passwords for users with administrative privileges, IORC. Something like that.
They haven’t kept up. So until they change the rules you can either be PCI compliant or implement the current best practice. Not both.
Your example completely ignores the temporal dimension.
The best practice was to rotate your passwords, but we discovered that this led users to picking less secure and easier to remember passwords and patterns.
Once technology offered up solutions to problems like password managers and breach notifications, that recommendation changed.
PCI used to mandate password changes for in-scope accounts (meaning they have access to credit card flows). Now that MFA is widely deployed that requirement only remains for accounts that do not have a second factor for authentication.
If you were ahead of the curve and implemented strong password policies that did not conform the the PCI baseline, all you had to do was explain to the auditor why. Assuming what you were doing genuinely increased your security posture it would be approved.
Other standards all used to recommend password rotation. Most have amended it to deprecate or even prohibit password rotation.
> Once technology offered up solutions to problems like password managers and breach notifications, that recommendation changed
It wasn’t just that.
The original recommendation for password expiration failed to take into account the human practices that resulted.
Everyone has worked in an office with passwords on post-it notes, or seen passwords numbered with sequentially incremented integers at the end. Password rotation isn’t merely a baseline level of assurance, it has a negative impact on security because of the effect it has on password hygiene. In practice, passwords that expire can be easily guessed by appending something to the end of the prior password. And they are more likely to be written down in plaintext.
Permanent, non-expiring passwords without MFA are stronger in practice than expiring passwords.
The exemption Apple wanted was not from a privacy law, but from the DMA. They never claimed to have an issue meeting their privacy laws when using their own product, it was other people's products that they said they couldn't guarantee the privacy of.
That's even worse, then. They are not responsible for other companies' products. So this is just another piece of anti-DMA propaganda then. They have been fighting it loudly and with toddler-level arguments since they became subject to it.
A huge part of Apple’s marketing, whether you believe them or not, is that they try to protect your privacy.
The smartphone is probably the most sensitive device most people own. It knows your location always. It has your banking apps. Your password manager. Your instant messages, and social media chats, it knows whether you’re walking, or driving, or talking on the phone, and to whom.
Once Apple allows any other vendor to vacuum all of that intensively private information out of an iPhone, Apple becomes indirectly responsible for potentially massive privacy breaches.
All of that happens only if the user chooses to do it though. Anybody is free to stay in the caged Apple garden. The EU just wants them to leave the door unlocked.
A door with a lock is different from a wall with no door. Same argument that gets made with government-keyed or government-breakable encryption schemes: it's better for everyone to not have the backdoor at all.
That's flatly not true. imessage interop means not just the person who installs the other app, but the data of everyone with whom they message loses the security/privacy guarantees created by imessage and Apple as a corp. Including massive resources pointed at securing the app itself.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea from a competition point of view, but good ideas can be discussed w/ an honest view of the quite real downsides.
Apple could have worked with other companies to make RCS secure by default instead of building their own little thing that openly and intentionally discriminates non-members of their club.
EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.
Apple says "We can't do this in a privacy preserving way".
You can definitely question what their true motivations are, but it seems pretty plausible that there is a moral case for this system to not be opened up to other providers who may do a worse job at privacy than Apple (especially when you are Apple and you trust yourself).
I think there is a place in these sorts of ecosystems for privileged players. If you buy an iPhone you implicitly must trust Apple to some degree.
> EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.
Not sure this is the case. My understanding is what the EU wants is that users can use Siri AI or a third party AI service from, say, Anthropic or OpenAI, at the same level of capabilities, just as you can switch default browsers. It's not about the underlying LLM (that would be the huge privacy concern), it's about the product built on top. Of course how a third party AI gets its data from the device would need to be approved by the user and that third party AI provider would have to justify what it's doing with that personal data to the EU watchdogs, just as Apple would need to do.
>But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.
You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.
Lemma 1: you want to protect your users privacy, and are also beholden to regulation enforcing that commitment (GDPR).
Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).
Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.
This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.
I am not sure this is as much of a tension as you make it sound: where is the obligation that a marketplace administrator will be blamed for any and all breaches of data privacy trust from a participating (likely malicious) third party?
According to GDPR, the app developer is the "data controller" and thus ultimately responsible. Only in the case where Apple knowingly participated in unlawful behavior is it likely to be held accountable, and even then, in addition to the app developer. Obviously, if we are not talking about leaks from the actual App Store system (eg. Apple account logins and user data).
So while it sounds plausible, the legal framework is exactly not what you describe here — Apple can claim to want better protection for customers by not allowing third party apps, but EU rejects that (it can similarly extend to app store itself) and pushes for competitive landscape with DMA instead.
Like they now hand over all your contacts, your location, calendar entries, microphone access, camera access. If you choose to do so.
Nothing holds them from having designed this as an API that others can use where the user has permission toggles of what data they want to share with the LLM provider.
This is clearly very different from usual permissions and access.
This would be unprecedented access to user data, enabling the most complete user profiling ever.
Ad companies, like Meta and Google, are going to spend huge amounts of money getting agents ready, because there will be a ridiculous amount of money behind all the data they're going slurp up, and the profiles they'll build for you.
Unless, Apple can figure out how to keep the leaches, that have consistently proven to be so, with court cases for receipts, at bay.
Interestingly, they claim to have done this and offer it as an API layer (Trusted System Agent) for other agents to use.
There is just this minor point that their own agent simply doesn't use it and goes directly to lower level interfaces nobody else gets access to: exactly the thing DMA was designed to stop.
1: If you want to protect user's privacy, you collect no personal information, so GDPR doesn't apply.
2: You do that.
3: Since your platform collects no private information, they get nothing from you. If they collect private information on their own, it's their job to comply with GDPR.
What you should do in case (3) is ask the user for permission to allow the 3rd party access to private data on their device. It's their choice (not yours) to allow it or not.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, DMA isn't a privacy regulation. It is simply about competition. You can be in 100% compliance with DMA and poor privacy protections. This is the crux of the problem. How do you preserve the privacy of your customers while complying with regulations where the simplest path is to compromise your customer's privacy?
The issue here isn't EU privacy laws (which Apple has been historically quite good at complying with, by big tech standards); it's EU _competition_ laws.
> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws?
The DMA and the GDPR are laws that at their core make each other more difficult. the stated outcome of the DMA - allowing any vendor/user full access to your device - is not easily supported when solving for privacy.
And then most users soon have given permissions to a ton of apps with sketchy records of protecting user data, so what was the point of even trying to protect privacy?
Protecting user privacy and reducing surface area for litigation against the business can happen simultaneously. Not that it is, but just saying, politics and difficult to define thresholds muddy the waters.
Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.
Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous.
The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior.
Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).
I am perfectly ok with EU having different rules of their own but they also can't be upset when features aren't offered there. That is the trade-off they have chosen and I am ok with it.
Nobody in the EU would have been upset if they said: we cannot offer this in the EU because we want to shut out competitors from providing alternative LLMs and this is not allowed in Europe. Fine. I don't care.
Many Europeans are upset that Apple blames Europe that they cannot implement this because it would sacrifice privacy. (Which is kind of ironic, because the EU has nearly the best privacy protection worldwide.)
Apple doesn't care about privacy. By default (without ADP), your (i)Messages, Drive files, contacts, calendars, backups of data from third-party apps are not end-to-end encrypted [1]. US law enforcement can request it. EU citizens are not protected because the US can use the CLOUD Act to demand the data. If Apple really cared about privacy, they would have closed that hole long ago.
Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.
> But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy
100% - just like Apple making such a grandiose show of "privacy". "Privacy" for Apple eventually led to Apple specific and Apple-only allowed ads in first party apps and now Siri connecting to Google servers.
Indeed. If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iPhone backups by default. But since they don't, US law enforcement can request my iMessage chats because the people I talk to (probably) do not have ADP enabled (which enables end-to-end encryption for backups).
I think there's a reasonable question of whether the Siri stuff is even a feature that customers want. Additionally, money can not solve all problems, 9 people can't make a baby in a month, and if these sorts of regulations are serious at all like they are for medical regulation then you really do need to do the work of assessing risks, etc., and there's a chain of waterfall development to all that.
> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
The one legacy in Apple that Steve Jobs left behind is their distaste for taking risks that lose them money (ChatGPT was going to be their AI core... but then they had Altman ousted, so they backed away and partnered with Google instead), and spending money. I think they're still the only company with a kitchen in the valley that still makes employees pay for their own lunch, and the reason is the most BS reason that Steve Jobs pulled out of his rear end. It's so the employees appreciate the lunch, really?
Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.
I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.
> Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.
People can also appreciate things they get for free though. I'd appreciate a free lunch, most places I've worked at, actually nowhere I've ever worked, EVER has given me a free lunch. Now if its a difference of paying for a quality lunch at a reasonable price, and not paying for lunch but its mediocre, then yeah, seems like a no-brainer.
I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs implemented was a way to get them back into the green.
Also, TIL:
> Jobs, who notoriously took a salary of only $1 a year, used to "scam" Apple out of free lunches by scanning his badge alongside colleagues and insisting on paying for everyone, knowing the charges would just default back to Apple.
Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.
> let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)
And you’re saying that consumers would be incorrect in thinking that?
The market regulators don't give a fuck if companies screw over their customers privacy wise, as long as it's to the advantage of European companies and European customers.
This can lead to absolute insanity as companies try to satisfy both privacy and market conditions. It's not simple. How many years did google waste with Sandbox?
I’m glad this is at the top of the comment chain. I’m also angry with myself that I kept reading other comments. As you say, the current situation makes sense. Apple made something they way they want, the EU says it doesn’t pass muster with their laws and so Apple doesn’t release it in the EU.
Siri AI is just one of many AI products that aren’t released in the EU. If people are mostly happy with that then I guess things will continue as is. I do find it a little odd that so many people are championing the DMA as a beacon of consumer choice when it seems to be limiting what consumers have access to.
> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
That's disingenuous. It's not about money, it's literally about engineering velocity. The amount of planning and engineering required for an entire interoperability layer that also ensures security and privacy is absolutely going to be something like a year-long engineering effort minimum. You can't speed that up by adding more money.
So it's either try to get an exemption to deliver this feature to Europeans while that work gets done, or wait 12-18 months for the work to be done -- work that isn't required to launch in the rest of the world.
Apple just wants consumers to be happy and be able to use their features. But the EU is requiring a ton of additional interop engineering, so consumers will just have to keep waiting and get features 1 or 2 years after the rest of the world, or never.
It sounds like the work on the privacy layer was significant and to give "equal" access to other competing AI systems, they would need to include that "for free" as part of the platform. Or they could try to keep that as the moat for Siri AI, and only offer privacy "entry points" that other agents can tie into, but vendors would have to implement privacy preserving functions themselves.
This is the bit that's likely hard, because generally keeping safety and privacy guarantees as data flows through the system is extremely hard, and Apple would not be able to guarantee it for other products without large review investment.
But ultimately, they probably just do not want to do it until Siri AI gets a decent marketshare first, so competing agents would have to both build new solutions for the platform once open, but also deal with an incumbent dominant player already on people's phones.
I understand Apple's position on this one. This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data. It is also a very useful feature. The EU regulators are disallowing guardrails without which this backdoor will be used to strip-mine people's personal data. The privacy implications are not legible to most people.
If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the encryption doesn't have backdoors for the government but this gives you access to all the same data.
When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.
It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.
The way Apple Health exchanges data with 3rd-party trackers (Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) is very well built and a good model of how other components in iOS could allow data exchange with very granular permissions.
Apple touts the "Private Cloud Compute". If they found a way to share your personal context to process on their cloud in a private and anonymized way, there is no reason the same process couldn't be used to handoff data to a 3rd party AI provider.
The technical problem is nothing like exchanging data with fitness trackers.
One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.
Indeed but you ignore my second paragraph: they have developed (and 3rd-party audited) a way to handoff all the data (parts of your Personal Context, etc.) to their cloud servers in a privacy preserving way on-device. Why couldn't the same process could be used to handoff the data to a 3rd-party AI provider? (genuine why, if you have an understanding of the thing you have a strong opinion about I'd genuinely appreciate the answer)
It looks like Apple is framing this as a privacy issue as a marketing tactic so that consumers will blame the EU when Apple COULD implement it without endangering privacy.
Apple PCC is using completely mad and paranoid amounts of security down to hardware and firmware level making sure nobody at any point of the supply chain can access the data.
EU can’t and won’t enforce the same rigour for 3rd party cloud AI. Which is the problem for Apple.
If said 3rd party service leaks private data, guess which company is going to be in the BIG HEADLINE and which one will hardly be mentioned in the news?
Ah, I see. I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device. Thought the server-side could be quite generic. Thanks!
If you want it to, for example, summarise your HRV or menstrual cycle you can't anonymise it or you don't have any data to analyse. It'd be just "wink wink nudge nudge" with zero context.
Of course, but the iPhone could send slightly altered data to avoid fingerprinting (tweaking age / weight / height slightly) like browsers do with sensors.
Some data could outright be replaced (names, etc) and swapped back on device.
It couldn't do it with ALL the data (eg. calendar data needs to be accurate) but just because you need to give context doesn't mean sacrificing privacy.
Everything would go through an Apple proxy before reaching a theoretical 3rd-party provider.
These wouldn't provide privacy GUARANTEES but could make it reasonably difficult and expensive to fingerprint?
Of course Google has the capacity to run PCC. This isn't about whitelabel PCC being run by FAANG.
This is about Super Private Benoau AI being available for any user to install. How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not? The home page says that they're the best and mostest private ever of course, has animations generated by Claude and everything.
But actually it runs on servers bought from Hetzner's server auction and stores all logs in plain text in open S3 buckets and the owner actively sells the user data to the highest bidder.
This is what Apple is worried about and EU either doesn't care or doesn't understand the issue.
> How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not?
How can you know whether Apple would actually respect your privacy or not? If it's on-device you can audit it, but how can you prove their cloud is actually respecting your privacy?
If you have an answer to this then why can't third-parties also do the same?
Nothing at all. But they do it because it’s clearly a priority for them and something that’s currently part of their corporate ethos.
Would it be better if something forced them to? Probably so! But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
That's exactly my point. It's just the reputation they've built.
> But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
This is the part that bugs me. Reputations are earned. Ask yourself: would Apple allow another entity to deploy their AI assistant on iOS if they respect user privacy at least as well as Apple? I doubt it! Apple is not doing this as a kindness to its customers - it directly benefits Apple as an excuse to lock competitors out of their platform.
This argument would be a lot more compelling if there was literally any company out there with an interest in doing this sort of thing that had even remotely comparable a track record to Apple.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Perplexity, and everyone else in this space are openly brazen about how much of your information they want to consume—however possible—to store in perpetuity and use for whatever future purpose they want.
In this space, sure. AI only exists and is improving because of extensive data collection. That's why Apple licensed models from Google. Anyone can go and download and run open-weight models, and many allow commercial use. If Apple opened it up I'm sure you would see new options which respect user privacy pop up.
Just look at Apple's stance on third-party web browsers to see what I'm talking about. There are browsers which respect user privacy, have good security, etc. but Apple uses the same excuse there: only Apple can be trusted to do it right.
Now the issue becomes opening the door only to the few entities that can be trusted. It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
This is one of those situations where multiple overlapping incentives all point the same way. In this case, Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway. Particularly since they seem to be the only large player taking this approach.
> It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
Which benefits Apple because it gets rid of competition on their platforms.
> Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway
At the cost of your freedom. Sure, it's not that bad now, but I'd be worried about the future of macOS because it's the least restrictive Apple platform right now.
And that went on for a long while before it was noticed.
Now imagine the same situation but an infinite whack-a-mole of alternative AI providers and just regular folk who will install mobile games from a frozen baby ad...
> But how many users are legitimately capable of evaluating how privacy preserving a random Cloud AI provider is?
Probably the same number of customers that are legitimately capable of evaluating the privacy of Apple's PCC?
Let's not forget a tiny company called Apple that once proposed Client Side Scanning to "save the kids" by hashing your entire iCloud. Apple loves demanding the moral high ground to promote asinine surveillance mechanisms with no safety guarantees for their users. Senator Wyden is adamant that Apple colludes with the US government to surveil metadata and intercept Push Notifications. Apple's definition of "private" doesn't actually entail privacy at all. Many third-party services are better positioned to protect their users than Apple is.
So why should users defer to Apple's arbitrary definition of privacy? It's obviously bullshit. If you're a traveling journalist, protestor or dissident, you might end up like Jamal Khashoggi for trusting Apple's services to keep you private.
Ahh, Apple's client side scanning - my favourite topic. The Internet collectively dropped their IQ to room temperature levels (in Celsius) when this was "discussed". I think I was one of maybe three people in the whole internet who actually read the papers describing how the feature works. The rest went with just the headlines and immediately sharpened their pitchforks and dulled their minds.
Let's go through the process in detail:
- IF you had iCloud syncing on (which meant your photos were on Apple's servers anyway) they would download a pre-generated set of perceptual hashes of KNOWN CSAM. Like actual child porn, vetted and verified by humans. Perceptual hashing is a fun tech, look it up, super useful outside of this context too.
- Then IF your phone, independently, with zero connections to the outside matched MULTIPLE (they didn't specify the exact count) known child pornography image phashes those would be uploaded to Apple's servers. There was some cryptographic boogaloo at this point too that mathematically prevented Apple from decrypting the photos without enough matches.
- Then an actual human would look at "reduced quality" (can't remember the exact term) versions of the matched photos and determine whether it's some dipshit / bad actor forcing fake matches with kitten pictures or actual CSAM material.
- If the human verifier confirms that the person's phone has actual confirmed child porn, the authorities would be contacted.
---
And the basic arguments:
"but muh privacy!" - You needed to have iCloud syncing enabled for this feature to be enabled at all. Your data is already on Apple's servers, they could just scan them there. But to do that they'd have to be able to decrypt them, which means the authorites can force them to do it too. Apple didn't want this. Thus: local scanning. You don't want your photos scanned, turn of iCloud sync. Done. Bad Tim Apple can't look at any of your photos.
"But what if I get multiple fake phash match files sent to me and I save all of them to my photos!" - then you'll inconvenience a human verifier for maybe 30 seconds. You won't get swatted or put on a list anywhere.
Oh and Apple already "hashes your entire iCloud" - also fully on device. That's why your iOS device runs hot for a week or so after installing a new major iOS revision. They run the fully local ML models on your pictures in the background and store them - also locally - to a database where you can go and search for "dog" or "receipt". Adding a phash to match to a local CSAM database is a non-issue at this point.
Why are you so focused on continuously sucking off Apple and putting them up onto a pedestal as a precious baby of the industry that can do no wrong and should have special rules just for them instead of _suing Meta into the fucking ground_ and making sure that this behaviour is punished in ways that make it never worth it to do ?
"Oh no, there's a bully. Let me just find a toxic relationship and hope they spend enough time bullying my bully so they forget about me" isn't exactly a recipe for success.
In Apple's press release[1], they mention proposing something similar to what you're talking about.
"Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU."
> Why couldn't the same process could be used to handoff the data to a 3rd-party AI provider?
You have more safeguards if it’s running on your own metal. It’s reasonable to want to understand that better, perhaps with your own red team, before opening up customer data to actual potential hostiles.
Yeah I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device and didn't realize how much plumbing was required server-side too to have good enough privacy guarantees
Well, it seems they couldn’t do it that way, and that’s why we don’t get it in the EU. You’re talking about every app on the phone sharing pii with third parties. Yours, and those who share data with you. This is a completely different situation than health data of a single individual. You use that “COULD” as you were certain it can be done. Tell us how.
> It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.
You don't seem to know how backdoors work.
Oppressive regimes mandate that tech companies pre-install apps to protect people from spam calls, or install specific root certificates so they can intercept your traffic and insert a helpful banner into your browsing session to remind you when to pray.
The EU isn't going to ask Apple to add DataCollectionBackdoor(). They are going to demand that in the spirit of freedom and happiness EU companies must have access to Apple users private data.
You want Apple to anonymize a users data, then hand that users data to a third party who knows who the user is? I don't think PCC is doing what you think it's doing.
The hypocrisy is easily explained by the overall attack on ownership... you dont own your own data. you dont own your car, your phone, your pc. Everyone wants to own all your stuff...
Well then explain me this: There are absolutely no restriction on MacOS where I can give Claude free access to everything. If you are a Mac and iPhone user that essentially gives it access to the exact same data. Why is the data only protect worthy when accessed on the phone directly?
The Mac is a pre-existing platform that is both more capable than iOS, and had an existing user base that used apps that had much greater access. Apple’s attempts to lock down the Mac have met with poor adoption.
In exchange, it also less secure, less user friendly, and less popular.
There is no one-click way to install an AI model on macOS like potentially iOS could have. I can easily imagine some grandma install on their iPhone some random AI model they saw in an AI-generated Facebook post with just one tap.
Laptops are a low security environment and already massively compromised. Thats why banks make you authorise transactions by approving them on your phone when you started them on the web.
Apple has been working for a while to secure MacOS but it’s hard without breaking compatibility with old processes.
iPhones have pretty good privacy controls. I don’t see how they can’t extend those to cover AI apps. I imagine the settings menu will get bonkers though. User education about apps slurping up all your data is needed regardless. People just trust apple with their talk of private cloud computing.
We have been able to choose our default app for 'assistant' on Android for a decade. It's fine. You can even revoke permissions if you want to.
And guess what ? Because you're allowed to choose something else than Siri, it doesn't mean you have to. You can still use Siri if you think it's better for your privacy.
What level of system access do they have? You can use 3rd party AI apps on iOS, they just can’t read app data or make actions on the system outside of the APIs that currently exist.
The new Siri has much deeper access to personal data and absolutely can not be trusted being siphoned off to a 3rd party server.
It’s a back door around normal app sandboxing and permissions systems. The security design of iOS was not meant to allow 3rd party apps to reach in and read any data from any app.
There is a 100% chance this would be used maliciously immediately. Meta would pressure users to install their meta AI agent, which would then go and read the users DMs, and create profiles on all the users who don’t even use Facebook by reading their data from everyone they talk to who did.
Personally I'd much prefer no siri access to app data than allowing evil companies like Meta/TikTok/Etc this level of access.
> This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data.
No. Only if you would consider the Linux/macos/windows filesystem API a backdoor too. On your desktop any app with sufficient permissions can read all your data. Would you call that a backdoor?
It's totally fine that Apple doesn't release this feature for EU customers. If they think they can still sell enough phones it's also fine I guess.
What's not fine, is to blame the EU for the missing feature. It's damaging their brand and damaging their reputation. Just think about if Porsche would make a press release and calling the US tariffs "un-American". Wouldn't be perceived well either.
> Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?
The world I want to live in is not the one where apple claims responsibility for every byte of my data which passes through their products.
I think web browsers are a nice comparison here. Chrome added some nice security features (e.g. safe browsing) which are broadly a good thing for reducing harm from websites, but at the same time if you go to a dodgy website and they harvest all your personal details no one blames chrome for that.
No doubt AIs are an interesting use case because of the sheer volume of personal data involved, but if I want to trust some other AI app like gemini or chatGPT with my data then why should I be restricted from doing that?
Sorry, Apple has to be dragged, kicking and screaming to allow app store alternatives, that they charge offensive amounts for "to ensure your security" and has Draconian review rules on the App Store "to ensure your security".
Sure, 3rd party will get some shit. But if Apple neither protected me on their App Store _or_ on the app stores that they extort, what the fuck is their racket for? As long as Apple keeps this behaviour, they deserve to have their cornflakes pissed in.
"I own data that may be stored on Apple's servers. Apple's operating system syncs that data to my local computer in a secure fashion. Apple's operating system exposes low-level APIs that allow other applications to access that data. I can install third party applications. Those third party applications can access that data and may exfiltrate it to an unvetted 3rd party cloud."
Your turn smart guy: Am I talking about iOS or MacOS?
I can't find the problematic statement. Off course the tariffs are a threat to the financial success of German car manufacturers, and they need to keep their investors updated.
The DMA is also threatening Apple's high profit margins. That's the whole point of the DMA.
It is multiple things at once. It's a typical antitrust law, to increase competition. Enough competition usually leads to lower prices and lower margins.
Such political statements never damage the brand for every citizen, but for some.
Tesla is a good example. Elon Musk became political and anti-EU, which resulted in an irreparable damage of the Tesla brand in Europe. Not for everyone, but a big group of people would never again consider buying a Tesla. As a result Tesla lost market share in Europe.
I find it interesting that Apple prefers to fall behind in Europe rather than opening their platform a tiny bit.
It gives us European some opportunities. I have a side project at work that was heavily threatened by Siri’s new features. Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming there anytime soon.
Handing full access to the data on a user's device over to a company with the scruples of somebody like Facebook is a privacy nightmare, not "opening their platform a tiny bit".
Because when you open it to Proton, you have to open it to Meta. And when Meta does Meta things, the first thing the average user will complain to is Apple - "didn't you advertise to me about privacy?!"
Yeah, but you get to choose who gets to rip off your data. Joking aside, perhaps there would be some privacy focused alternatives and most importantly for Europeans, they would be hosted in the EU.
Apple could make settings for controlling exactly what is shared with the various assistants installed including Siri itself. No need for defaulting to full access.
Apple is not abiding, because they want to use time to really ensure they have the best assistant, before they allow competitors to build assistants for iPhone that can replace Siri (in the EU only probably)
EU rejected that. DMA says that 3rd parties must have the same access to data as Apple does, and obviously Apple does not want to turn Siri into a cookie banner party.
Europe is irrelevant in world affairs. It's an uncomfortable truth. They are not a powerful actor. I'm not saying this proudly. EU is idealistic. A political religion. They don't play realpolitik. Which is why the EU has no power. None. You can disagree. But you cannot ignore the truth. You don't have to like the nations that have real power. I don't either. But the biggest mistake we can make is turning our backs on reality.
Is there a way to downvote this comment? If Europe is so irrelevant in world affairs, then why is there a bustling discussion on this issue about who is in the right or wrong here? This is comment lacks good faith to argue against EU's regulatory power if this OP was going for
> It gives us European some opportunities...Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming anytime soon.
We've had endless opportunities to compete during Apple's entire 50 year existence.
As someone living in Europe I feel ashamed to read you openly admitting this. This sentiment would feel at home in the USSR.
Instead of trying to create things the world finds useful by building something better/cheaper/more innovative, we're choosing protectionism so we can screw our customers with inferior products they're forced to buy...and relax.
I think we've done enough relaxing in Europe.
We were the birthplace of the industrial revolution...the technologies of which went on to bring the entire world out of poverty last century.
Do we seriously have nothing valuable to contribute to the world during the entirety of the digital revolution? If not, I think our decline and collapsing social welfare systems are deserved.
Who knows? There has been a lot more attention to alternatives as of recently and there is more pushback against lock-in using remote attestation, Google/Apple Pay, etc.
It seems things start to get rolling in a way that they haven't since the start of the Google/Apple duopoly.
If Apple complied and opened up Siri like the EU wants, the only competition users could choose would be between US companies. DMA does not help EU companies.
It is entirely possible that Apple soon may loose EU market entirely once the Trump gets a relief in Iran and once again tries to invade Greenland.
Apple's services revenue is showing a strong growth and it is entirely dependent on keeping the ecosystem closed so that it can take its commission and sell its services.
Once things get moving they would prefer still having control on the on the US market rather than making slightly more money(if any. No one wants this AI stuff as you can tell by the strong sales Apple keeps having despite or thanks to not having AI integrated) when the EU market is still open to them.
In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law
Access Denied
Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed.
Omg, I don’t now know how to cope without reading your comment.
It was probably really relevant and life-changing. Well I guess I’ll just get on the way I did before.
The same with Siri, I don’t need it and don’t care about some hyped up AI that Apple wants to push down my throat.
Similar to your comments, I don’t need it and if you (and Apple) don’t want to share or comply with the rules, well why should that make me unhappy? Or make me get angry at the EU?
The beauty of it is that in their exemption request, Apple claimed they have plans to introduce an intermediary system for other AIs within 18 months. So they can no longer claim that it's impossible for security reasons.
Apple have enough legal experience with the EU and technically competence to have baked EU AI, privacy and anti-monopoly compliance into their product from the start.
In fact any U.S. company could base their products on EU legislation, since it provides wide safeguards for consumer privacy.
Apple deliberately chose not to and are now being deliberately obtuse and misleading.
Anyone would think they didn’t have lawyers.
Either they are incompetent or it’s a deliberate choice to play this card. I don’t think it’s incompetence.
You mean DMCA. It is not an antitrust framework. Europe has pretty robust anti-trust framework. DMCA is an attempt to regulate companies that cannot be legally considered monopolies, and that do not run afoul of any pre-existing EU regulation.
Just for that case a new category of business classification was invented: the gatekeepers, and coincidentally almost all of those gatekeepers are American companies. Unlike antitrust regulation and other EU regulation that wan't based on clearly observed harm to the consumers, as otherwise that would have been covered by existing laws. It was solely designed to prevent businesses to have a potential ability to do something anti-consumer.
DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law. DMA is the Digital Markets Act, a EU law.
It is in fact an antitrust law. It basically argues (correctly in my opinion) that Apple and other companies have created new markets inside of their products. And in those markets they exert total control, including charging developers extortionate fees, forcing them to use their subpar and expensive payment systems or restricting what users can run on the devices they own & a lot of paid money for.
Sorry, my mistake. DMA. However, it runs counter to the definition of antitrust law, that is the law that applies to the trust or a monopoly, an entity that controls the market. DMA instead applies to the companies of certain size, regardless whether they have market control or not.
It's a matter of interpretation. From the DMA's perspective, the iPhone is a market and thus Apple has a monopoly on that market. Likewise they consider MS to have monopoly control of the Windows market.
That reinterpretation would have make Apple a monopoly and thus other anti-trust laws would apply, which did not happen. As I said: they are introducing new category, the gatekeepers, for the sole purpose of making the law applicable.
Depends on the news you read I guess, to me the word "slammed" is pretty commonplace in politics news-reporting and has been for a while (read: well before the modern take-down content that's so common to social media platforms).
You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.
Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.
(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)
I agree it’s a bit sensationalist. Here’s the EU Commission spokesperson’s criticism:
>“The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU.
>“Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards,” Regnier said.
Obviously he's going to champion the EU's position, but his framing is internally inconsistent.
1. he claims the DMA doesn’t prevent Apple from launching products in the EU
2. the DMA sets certain requirements which determines whether features can ship in the EU
It's fair to say “the DMA doesn’t ban Siri AI,” but that's not the real issue. The regulation sets conditions, and Apple is arguing those conditions make rollout infeasible. The Commission claims its a compliance problem, not a regulatory block, but the reality is less binary. At a certain point the regulation is self-defeating. What is that point? This is the discussion that the EU lawmakers cannot acknowledge.
You are likening the DMA to China's protectionist laws. China requires 51% Chinese ownership of domestic operations, adherence to CCP censorships laws, etc That benefits domestic companies nothing and foreign companies a lot. It's protectionism.
Whereas the EU laws apply to foreign and domestic companies alike, and the goal is consumer protection. The compliance difficulty does not vary between foreign/local.
This is a common sentiment of EU tech regulation proponents. You may want protectionism but that's not really what these laws are about. Why not simply adopt the CCP's policy towards technology?
Does not address Apple’s specific allegation, that the EU demanded that competing AIs have direct systemwide access to all apps and data, while Apple wanted to add an intermediation layer which Siri or competitors would plug into, and which would force the same level of user visibility (a popup at the top) over any AI’s behavior.
I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.
I think EU's position was that Apple can impose whatever rules and restrictions on 3rd parties as long as Siri is itself subject to ALL of those rules and restrictions. The restrictions were up to Apple to determine. What was not OK was to roll out Siri without restrictions yet impose them on other AI providers.
I believe that the issue was that the EU wanted Apple to open up their new AI agent interface (the ability to control every app on your phone so Siri can call you an Uber or whatever), and Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate.
First they are not complying in China. Second it is sheer arrogance if not outright racist crap that China's demands are unreasonable but EU's reasonable.
Seriously EU folks need to come to down to earth sometime.
I would venture that Apple is going to go with something fairly different in China with Chinese partners. This is different from 3rd party access because they aren't opening up their phones, it will just be a fixed 2nd party solution (like they do with Google, except Google -> Alibaba, Google Cloud -> Shanghai Water corporation or something like that).
The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.
Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.
So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.
Thats what Apple wants you to think. In reality it has nothing to do with privacy. Apple could let 3rd parties tap into these APIs but only after the user clicks away a big scary message telling the user they are leaving the comfort of the apple curated garden.
This allows competition, but also allows privacy for those who want it. See? Simple really, but Apple being Apple dont want to let 3rd parties use its AI APIs and so we have this standoff.
Big scary warnings aren’t a solution either. I watch the way my son interacts with consent screens and warnings, and it’s barely believable- the average person is very well trained to click through the warnings.
Someone might believe that people who ignore the warnings deserve everything they get, but I respectfully disagree. I remember helping my grandma uninstall and remove all the hostile browser extensions that had tricked her into installing them. If Apple is protecting vulnerable populations by taking the choice out of the users hands, even if it’s only profit motivated, I’m okay with that until someone presents an alternative that actually addresses those needs.
Apple is very good at “big scary warnings” that are also quite difficult to click through without knowing the correct steps to take. See also the EU alternative app stores, or running an unsigned app on macOS, or installing a device profile…
This is mostly wrong. The DMA has a process to determine if a service provider acts a gatekeeper to the market, and let's be honest if Apple is not one, then I don't know who else besides Google..
So there is no privacy argument in there except Apple didn't want to design a interface that complies and is safe.
Apple is using Cloud compute as well to enable Siri AI.
If you want to you could still use Apple or another provider you decide to trust - or even one that does everything locally. The competition would still have to follow GDPR after all.
If Apple had e.g. required competitors to undergo similar independent audits that would probably be allowed as it is quite similar to how Apple solved the third party app store issue.
It sounds like they are whitelisting the hashes of all the Google software and OSes and stuff to ensure nothing is changed out from under them without them knowing.
Even if you could make all the other possible vendors run private cloud compute style stuff that would be a lot to manage.
And I can’t imagine the EU would like, and as a user I would certainly hate, the “OK you can use Grok but you lose all privacy too bad“ dialogue box they could make.
I don't even think it offers a meaningful degree of security. It's a form of theater, you have to be hand-selected to perform the audit that Apple promised.
Most sysadmins know that hash matching only mitigates a small subset of rare upstream attacks. Apple could still be MITMing the whole thing (SSL added and removed here :)) and no auditor would get the chance to check. The offered audit is so weak that I would not trust any FAANG business to administrate it.
Apple is once again demanding arbitrary centralization to give them an undeserved veto power. None of this is for security.
Have a set of clearly-defined requirements that doesn't randomly reject valid candidates? Nobody wants another opaque system like the App Store review process.
By the sound of it, Apple's offered audit doesn't include insight into the most dangerous parts of a system like this. This could easily lead to a situation where real security experts are denied access to promote influencer-adjacent Yes Men who rubberstamp the hashes matching without any question.
Hence my concern for "SSL added and removed here" - none of Google's famously backdoored infrastructure will be audited. For privacy purposes, Apple's promise is woefully incomplete.
That's a very bad faith reading on what Apple said.
How I understood it that they want _actual_ security researchers, not some random dude who once installed Kali Linux and ran nmap.
It's state of the art private compute according to actual experts and everyone will be wasting their time if the "researchers" need to be coached through the process and explained the basics of the system's operation.
At this point the EU doesn’t trust Apple’s fair rules. Which is very much earned.
So if they did that here, I doubt the EU would accept it. And even if they did as soon as a competitor of any side/credibility cried foul I’m sure the EU would make life very hard for Apple to prove they’re not being unfair in even the tiniest way.
Siri AI has the capability to read your screen and access a lot of personal stuff. I don't blame Apple for not wanting to open this up to allow any model to access it. It seems Apple proposed a number of solutions which were denied.
While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.
We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones. Nothing about this is about choice or the free market. They want special treatment.
Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).
> We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones.
Do you really? The only two types of operating systems for phones that you could reasonably use are iOS and Android. So it's either Apple or Google.
Imagine a world, in which you could only consume Apple or Google services on those phones. No more Netflix or Disney+ on iPhones - only Apple TV Plus because the streaming video API is not available to third party apps. I think there are plenty of other examples to demonstrate the point.
A free market doesn't work if you have a duopoly. A free market requires the freedom to choose between different services, which Apple is trying to limit by only allowing Siri AI to access specific OS interfaces.
Not sure why some people on hackernews support more locked down operating system.
There are phones running alternative versions of Android with no google dependency, and there are phones running linux.
Furthermore, if we lived in a world where the two main OS's were locked down to an insane degree, we would also have plenty of alternative operating systems. The reason we don't today is because we don't really have a need for it, in the same way linux has a monopoly on servers and nobody really cares.
Them making the only phones anyone uses makes them the gatekeepers on what people do on their phones -> Apple and Google are gatekeepers under the DMA.
There are hundreds of phone models. A smartphone is a just one type.
Apple came out of nowhere and invented the smartphone because the existing system was controlled by the telcos and horrible phone technology. The same thing can easily happen again.
It makes no sense to limit Netflix on phones and people would probably stop buying iPhones.
If the EU wants an "open" phone ecosystem, they should foster real innovation in their space and build it themselves.
EU does not want privacy. They actually want to get rid of privacy every so often (adding backdoors in encrypted conversations). So far it has not worked out, but I’m afraid they will succeed at one point.
To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh.
I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an European would really much like my government to stop asking ridiculous things that do not profit the consumer.
Believe it or not, the eu is not one single entity with one undivided goal. As is perfectly well demonstrated by chatcontrol being proposed by one side and continually struck down by the other.
Good for the total of eight users that will then use an alternative agent once it landed. Similar to the twelve people that use alternative app stores.
> Prior to Apple's update, around 65% of users attempting to install the Epic Games Store on iOS were thwarted by Apple's deceptive design. After the update, the drop-off rate has gone from 65% down to around 25%, and continues on a downward trend as users upgrade to the new version of iOS.
The whole point is to try and avoid ending up in situations like this, where apple were able to extort 30% of app store revenue because they dictate how people are allowed to use their devices.
the core technology fee is a big obstacle to alternative app stores.
openclaw is massively popular. there is a lot of diversity in "persona" agents, which are different than coding agents or the agent apple demoed. they're not all the same.
i don't know, i don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.
That's fine, good actually. I wish these companies would go further tbh.
Like when the UK banned encryption I wish Apple would have just disabled iMessage entirely there. Show a message saying that due to UK law, they cannot operate an encrypted messaging service there any longer. The backlash would get that law changed pretty quick.
Instead they disabled encryption for the UK, making all of us less secure.
There is a saying "American trust companies more than their government, Europeans trust their governments more than companies" when nobody should trust either.
Sometimes a company's incentives are going to be aligned with their users, but a lot of the times they won't and consumer protection regulation is useful.
Sometimes a government will have the good of their citizens in mind, and a lot of the times they will seek money and power just like companies do. Lobbies, fines, overreaching regulation.
The UK (and EU's attempted Chat Control) is some fascist bullshit. But allowing you to own the device you paid for and use it as you please (including letting you install whatever software you choose to) isn't.
What is the countdown to Germans outraged when someone from outside the EU is walking down the street and catches a fleeting audio clip of them which is processed by Apple's AI?
Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?
For context, under German law recording spoken words without consent is illegal. There is some nuances when speaking in public loud enough for strangers around to hear though
There is a 2-week delay too, if you arrive in the EU you will still have access to the features for two weeks. When you leave the EU, it will take two weeks outside to gain access to the features. At least that's been my experience having a EU account and living mostly in the EU. Might be different with foreign accounts.
Have you considered that the EU's privacy laws may simply be onerous and burdensome, and the fact that a web of red tape has caught another fly may not actually reflect on the privacy claims of "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute"?
I think OP didn't question the privacy of their Private Cloud Compute, just Apple's bad faith: they claim they can't handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to 3rd-parties when they tout that they absolutely CAN handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to their servers.
Apple frames this as a privacy issue when it's only a brand/control issue.
That’s right, they can hand it over to their servers. And they’ve got special agreements with Google to do the same exact thing. That preserves privacy.
Is it possible to do that with absolutely any company that wants to be able to be the AI on your phone? Are most of those companies even capable of handling something like that?
Yeah I overestimated the PID stripping that was being done on-device before being handed off to a server. After other comments I realize there needs to be a lot of plumbing on the server-side too.
PCC is supposed to work only on Apple silicon. You are supposed to trust that the input will be decrypted within the enclave which is next to inference engine on the same box. This way you know the input does not leave the server. If they offload to another server (eg google) then the privacy boundary is broken, once it leaves the enclave. Microsoft does it differently, where inference is confidential so more guarantees if that could be replicated.
Google has a similar thing they announced a year or two ago that uses the various hardware security stuff in the PC world that Apple is working with them to add to the list of approved stuff that gives PCC level security.
Europeans support that by and large. So either agree or have no ability to sell. This idea that companies know better about their users’ needs including privacy and choice is ridiculous. Apple is not a small company which is bullied as well.
Reading the EU commenters' opinions is strange to me.
>Good! I'm glad I can't have new and improved!
In the US, we basically see this as a shakedown by foreign governments against our successful companies. It really is a matter of "build your own iPhone" you guys. You had Nokia, so don't tell me you can't compete globally. I'm pretty fed up with Google and Apple personally, so please do deliver me a nice EU phone with sd card, removable battery, unlocked sims, usb-c, and all the other nice things your regulators demand.
Allowing Siri competitors. EU is 100% right to demand from Apple to give the same data that Siri has to any other app (competitor) that the user chooses to install, trusts and has granted access. The grant should be the gate keeper, not Apple.
User privacy, data retention, pii, etc - I am not 100% sure here - if you send user data somewhere to a LLM, it gets very complicated, very fast, and probably the rules should be revisited / simplified / relaxed.
There is a widespread expectation here in the EU that every vendor in the world wants to access the common market and thus will accept any regulations and limitations that come with it.
Given that our share of global GDP has dropped from 25 to 17 per cent in twenty years, with a steady downward trend, I am not convinced that this principle will hold for much longer, and this case of Siri may be one of the canaries in the coalmine.
If/when we drop to single digits, many vendors won't likely care anymore.
What could Apple/Siri be asking for an exemption from that Google/Gemini has already complied with? Accessing iCloud photos to edit them? Parsing email etc?
Probably not, but it's still available. The DMA most likely would require the ability for users to be able to benefit from to the AI regardless of which email/photo/messaging provider they prefer to use.
Apple still tries to integrate its own software deep into the phone and hope to get market share that way.
I am really glad someone is putting a stop to this behaviour. Regardless if it is Microsoft, Apple or someone else trying to force users to their products with no choice.
They’re already two years behind on this. And they’re only launching with one language anyway.
It’s not like the feature is fully finished.
If it took another year to get out the door and be compliant, do you think they would’ve wanted to wait? Or do you think they would rather launch now and then provide a compliant version later?
it's more Apple's attempt to prevent users to choose their own models. Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index. They could implement a big warning that shows "if you proceed with this request, Spotlight will send this and that to the model provider." But Apple chose not to do that.
> Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index
How? How do you safely handover effectively every single bit of data on someone’s phone to any third-party company and preserve privacy?
Sure you can try and demand agreements from the third parties but will the EU see that as a move to limit competition?
Ignoring all other concerns it is a rather thorny problem.
I don’t think the EU would accept, and as a user I certainly wouldn’t accept, having to agree to a pop-up every time I used any feature that used any data on my phone that might go to a third-party AI.
If you decide to upload all your data to $company, that’s your choice. I don’t see why a user shouldn’t have the choice to do that. People already have all their data with Google and Meta, so I don’t see why this would be an issue for many. It’s not Apples job to protect users from themselves.
Besides, opening up the API would also allow people to self-host their models and plug in their own servers instead of having to trust the whole private cloud compute project (yes I know, it’s verifiable by experts, but I as an average homelabber certainly can’t).
It’s important to note that this isn’t about privacy. It’s about freedom of choice, and the avoidance of lock-in due to monopolistic practices.
> It’s important to note that this isn’t about privacy.
Strong disagree.
Most people have no idea what someone could do with their phone's cumulative data.
And when Facebook offers to dramatically enhance your personal network experience if you just configure their AI engine into your phone's settings, how many will understand the impact of that?
Then that's an issue where GDPR steps in. Obviously privacy is important. But so is user choice. Again, this specific problem we're talking about here is about user choice. Privacy is a different concern entirely.
Is Facebook evil? Absolutely. Should people stop using it? Absolutely. Is drinking, gambling, eating junk food and smoking bad for you? Absolutely. Should this mean adults should not have the choice to do these things? Debatable.
The APIs in iOS that turn feature flags on/off as you travel now have gotten insanely complex. Some are on time triggers, some change instantly, some depend on where your iCloud account was setup, AFAIK there isn't a black and white answer as to what happens when you move a non-EU iPhone through Europe anymore, "it depends". It's similarly vague in the other direction.
Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.
I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.
From past experience, it is when you are physically in the EU, but this implementation could obviously differ from how they've gated features in the past.
I have the complete opposite experience. Originally had a Canadian bought iPhone in Spain, had all the features a Canadian has and a European doesn’t (or vice versa). Upgraded to a Spanish bought iPhone and I am still a “Canadian”. I’ve been here for nearly 5 years but my Apple account is still fully Canadian (Canadian address, Canadian credit card on file). I think it’s Apple account location, maybe with some sort of system to allow people to switch countries but not allowing that to bypass restrictions? Or: that’s why a EU citizen can’t just switch their account location to unlock features?
I have a European account, when I lived in Japan I could use all the features (iPhone Mirroring, etc.) that are blocked in the EU. When back in the EU I can still use them for about 2 weeks before they get blocked again.
So does this mean if in the eu we get only the default dumb siri and wont get the new upgraded siri? Apple will need to keep old siri working? I never use siri because it it completely useless. It doesn’t understand a word I say.
The EU is only interested in interoperability and centralization of data so they can put their citizens under surveillance. I hope Apple continues to exit this market on the edges.
Ah yes the well known EU equivalent of the CIA, NSA
The one that’s so secret it’s not in any of the treaties that the sovereign nations that comprise the EU signed up for and implemented in line with their own democratic processes
That agency
Meanwhile they struggle to put together a border patrol, but advanced pan European surveillance apparatus that isn’t run by the US. Yeah bro
I don't think they were necessarily thinking of one EU-wide agency, but the recent attacks on encryption including Chat Control which almost passed, a lot of EU countries voting for far-right governments. I do believe we still have it better than in the US wrt privacy (e.g. we don't have Flock cameras), but we need to be careful considering what EU governments have been doing.
Of course, but I'm replying to a comment that speaks like surveillance doesn't exist in the EU because there is not a European NSA, so I'm talking specifically about the EU surveillance risk.
> Apple executives [...] said that virtual AI assistants would have unprecedented access to a wide swath of personal data on a user's device, including virtually all of their communications.
Is this supposed to be a good thing when Apple does it? That sounds utterly undesirable.
yeah, we are talking about giving random apps gain full control over your whole damn phone and every file in the filesystem.
If I were apple i'd want to give people enormous amounts to tools to control that access. Specific popups whenever it tries to access data (for the first time) from any given app. OpenAI would like access to all of your text messages, yes/no. I'd also want audit logs etc.
The nightmare is facebook (or the like) releasing an ai model into the current facebook app and forcing people to decide between looking at their grandkids pictures or allowing facebook to read your whole damn life into a database. So perhaps these apps need to be mandated as a connector for Apple Intelligence and nothing more.
I mean if you decide you want to give access to Google to everything on your phone, go for it. So far I trust apple, they haven't let me down yet. Placing these models on hardware is a great trust-building feature.
From personal, separate experience with Europe. It's quite common that the market watchdog and the privacy watchdogs are at odds with each other and make it impossible to achieve a solution that satisfies both of them.
Another example here is Google Chrome - which still allows third party cookies because even thought the privacy regulator wanted them gone, the market regulator required them to architect a solution that was unworkable to not take advantage of their gatekeeper advantages when others didn't have the same rights as them. Google finally said fuck it, and walked away from the privacy features in order to satisfy the anti-trust regulators.
Not shipping this feature in Europe is a common way to deal with satisfying the balkanized regulators there.
Honestly with Apples high bar of engineers and their massive budgets. If they wanted to they would. So to me it's a good decision from the EU commission to not give into the bullying from Apple. (and others)
If you are, like me, one of the EU customers that are again disappointed by Apple's behavior, please take 5 minutes to send Apple feedback about that: https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone/
Apple does not adhere to EU law. It's their task to either go with the local law, or leave their customers hanging. And I rightfully express my disappointment that they currently do the latter.
They do adhere to the law perfectly by not providing a law breaking feature. If you don't like the way the law allows that, you should address your complaints to the lawmaker.
I hope more companies start doing this. If Europe wants to have laughably stringent laws and micromanage companies it should be prepared for many of those companies to exit the market. Europeans can either stop being unreasonable or, you know, create their own bloc-wide champions.
These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny. Let's say I have several citizenships, live mostly in the EU, but currently stay in Japan, do I get the features or not?
Like app store regional gating and DVD regions, these restrictions are dinosaurs of the past.
I mean, borders still exist, and laws apply within borders. I don't believe that national (or supra-national in the EU's case) sovereignty is yet a dinosaur of the past.
Good. I wish the US had some privacy regulations as well. I can't believe how much credit folks are still giving Apple after all the BS they pulled (I mean direct Ad revenue is a $9 billion (and growing) business for Apple, and that's just the stuff they make public, not including search share revenue and other such deals).
Apparently their "Verifiable Transparency" claim just means Apple invited unnamed outside security experts and independent researchers to inspect and verify the integrity of (what they claim to be) its Private Cloud Compute code... LOL :)
I'll believe it when I can run the "private cloud compute" on my own hardware that I can firewall in my rack and monitor its network outputs.
There is a way to implement this functionality in an interoperable way that complies with the DMA. Apple just chose not to. Not because it's impossible to implement it in a privacy-respecting way, it just wants to lock people into their ecosystem, the exact thing DMA is protecting users against.
Apple realized its standard malicious compliance playbook won't fly this time, so now they're trying to sway public opinion by not rolling out this feature in the EU. It won't work. They're just going to lose market share and will have to backtrack when they do. Tech regulation doing its job.
Because this is not related to the GDPR at all, but the Digital Markets Act (DMA). It's purpose is to enable competition and not allow big tech to abuse their market dominance (e.g. in this case Apple not wanting to grant any competition the same access to MacOS so that they don't have to face competition for Siri AI).
It's all bullshit anyway. Apple could design a privacy framework around a fully integrated AI subsystem, "Do you want to allow ChatGPT access to Mail? (Developer message:) ChatGPT can read your emails to help summarize your inbox, or compose new mail."
This privilege system already exists. This is just marketing.
This is imperialism mentality, there are much divide in US politics and society but they seem to agree on trying to dominate and berate the UE in particular. I see it displayed even among progressive commentators it doesn't surprise me it is also reflected among progressive companies. But as soon as it comes to Trump or to China then it is not the same rethoric, stance, rashness at all. This selected stances and courages don't impress me at all. I also don't have much sympathy for Europe here, i guess Europe got what it deserves when you accept and do nothing to escape the fate to be a vassal you are rightfully treated like a vassal, nothing more.
EU doesn't come out looking good here. Clearly the onerous regulation is stifling innovation. It was always hard to argue otherwise, but the hits keep coming.
Apple stock is down more than 4% right now. That is a big dump for such a blue chip stock. IDK if it is due to this EU ban or Apple choice of going with Gemini (instead of making their own models).
Apple stock rises leading up to WWDC and then drops following the keynote every single year. People keep betting that this is the year that they're going to announce the next iPhone and the stock is going to 10x.
Right, wanting operability, alternative default apps, equal access to APIs is "wanting to live in the stone age". POSIX is the stone age model, and Microsoft is the future.
Generalization. "You guys" who? Most people actually know DMA has nothing to do with privacy. There are ways to hand off PID-stripped data to a 3rd-party.
It would be nice if Europe had companies innovating at this level but it’s not happening. If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies, so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.
All I know is we are buying the same devices designed by the US but keep increasing the list of features we can’t enjoy.
> so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.
Says it right there:
"Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards," Regnier said.
"Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA - and this for at least 18 months. That's not an option."
Mistral is against these EU regulations. I bought a printed version of the AI act, it's 600 pages of absolute nonsense, with 5 mandatory committees on national, eu, company level; 12 steps 6 months processes to release a new features; daily reporting obligations to yet another committee. It's just not possible to release software with the regulations as they are written.
Honestly, it's probably more that Apple have been arguing about basically every single thing they are being made to do under DMA, amd the respective Directorate has basically no patience left for them at this point.
Never underestimate the power of a really, really, really irritated counterparty.
In other things Apple has absolutely been a complete jackass and deserves a very large amount of the smack down they’ve been getting. I’m sure that’s a part of this.
However they are also a 100,000 pound gorilla. If you fight with Apple over $ISSUE, even if they’re right in that case, you get headlines and possibly PR points. Lots of people here are quite happy to be mad at Apple. And other companies take notice that you’re serious.
If you argue with a tiny company from Spain, most of the world doesn’t care and you get no headlines.
Apple is complying with EU law by not releasing a feature that is not compliant with EU law. And the EU appears to be trying to make hay over that fact.
Apple tries to market its product as privacy-focused, yet the privacy of their new AI features is so bad they don't meet EU standards? Is that the message here?
It's the inverse problem. EU wants anyone to be able to install a different AI agent onto their phone with the same access as Siri. Apple says "no- we need time to figure out how that would work, we want other agents to meet the same privacy standards of PCC/on-device that Siri uses". Which EU said no.
I don't think there's a clear good guy/bad guy here.
This conflict applies to many tools that require high privileges:
* If you allow the user to grant those privileges to third-party applications, they can grant it to applications that abuse it, resulting in security and privacy risks. You might even be blamed for allowing them access (e.g. the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal).
* If you don't allow the user to do that, third-party tools won't be able to serve those needs, which can be considered anti-competitive preferential treatment of your own tools.
So, first they have to be regulated because Apple and Android form a duopoly. Then they want to get an exception that the other duopoly player does not get.
Of course, as usual they use their PR machine to blame the EU, whereas they really just want to abuse their platform's position to shut out competitors.
I have been a decades long Apple user, but their anti-competitive behavior, pushing ads into the OS and apps, and their treatment of developers (who made the iPhone big) is just gross.
EU wants people to be able to plug any model into the new Siri system that will have unlimited access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc.
Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.
Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC two years ago, they had plenty of time to work on interoperability. Besides that:
access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc. Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.
The point is that if Apple's model gets all that access, they should give others access to those APIs as well, otherwise they are giving themselves benefits over the competition. A company can do that, but not once they are considered a gatekeeper in the EU. It's up to the user to choose an LLM provider that has good privacy rules (or stick with Apple if there is no other provider). That's fair competition, a user can weigh pricing, privacy, etc. and make their own choice. Now they are stuck with Apple and have to get an iCloud+ subscription to fully use the AI features. The 18 month delay is not to figure this out, it's to entrench themselves as much as possible first.
Following your line of reasoning, if Apple had this behavior in 2010-2015, instant messaging applications outside iMessage wouldn't have the option to ask access to your contacts (privacy), no possibility to share a location in a chat (privacy), no means to show notifications (probably privacy too), etc.
It's surprising how much people are willing to do the bidding of tech oligarchs. Remember, this is the company that has spent years doing malicious compliance around the DMA and DSA, why should they be trusted this time?
> The point is that if Apple's model gets all that access, they should give others access to those APIs as well, otherwise they are giving themselves benefits over the competition
Yes. They SHOULD. So how did they do that without throwing away their privacy promise or running afoul of the privacy laws?
First, LLM providers providing their services to European customers are bound to European privacy laws (GDPR) as well. If third-party providers violate the GDPR, it is not Apple's problem. Just like it's not the problem of Debian if you run Claude Code and Claude Code decides to upload your whole life (even though the OS provides the APIs to read the files).
Second, they could provide users with permission toggles of what users want to share and what not. Same as iOS/Android do now for contacts, location access, etc.
This is about the Digital Markets Act, its not the EU saying it isn't secure enough, they are saying users should be able to choose to use the same functionality but with different AI providers.
Compliance with DMA would have Apple hand over system-wide access to AI features to third parties, which could compromise user privacy and security.
Apple's philosophy is that new APIs need some time to stabilize before they can be baked-in as a commitment to third-party developers.
So new APIs are almost always first-party only. Apple designs the API and becomes the first consumer of it. This experience of dogfooding their own APIs lets them iterate and learn without breaking compatibility with third-party developers consuming the API.
Only after an API has been hardened in this way does it become eligible for third-party consumption, where Apple can promise to document and support those APIs publicly.
It makes sense then, that if the DMA mandates equal access to new APIs for third-parties, then Apple will just disable new first-party APIs in the region until they've gotten their bake-in period elsewhere in the world. Sorry, EU!
While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.
They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.
It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.
Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.
These laws only apply to megacorps. It's not an existential risk to them, as Apple is clearly proving now.
Who is saying that enforcing companies to open their systems to competition is making them mediocre? Maybe if that's the end result, they should put more time into designing systems that wouldn't become mediocre just by allowing third parties to do things with those said systems? We need to stop defending corporates for abusing their monopolies.
Megacorps weren't always giants and it's not unusual for small companies to eventually become giants through excellent vertically-integrated products, and such companies would become subject to these regulations.
Interoperability is not free. One of the trades it brings is a notably lowered ceiling in terms of tightness and capabilities, and this persists no matter how many man-hours are poured into engineering the systems that enable it.
The Linux desktop is a great example of this at play. While it's technically worked for decades at this point, it's been a constant struggle to make it a high quality, thoroughly polished experience end to end and that's partly thanks to the unavoidable friction and gaps between layers that comes with interoperability and tens of involved parties.
Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)
It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
Exactly, that's actually why I LIKE this decision so much. I'm not on Apple's side, but I REALLY like the idea that a company just says, "Fine, we'll comply by not even offering this product." It's a perfectly legitimate choice, and it FORCED Apple to evaluate the pros and cons.
I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it. I like that Apple also is refusing to just bend over to the EU. We need more of these types of conflicts so we can work out good regulations, and not just always bend over and take it from whatever party won.
While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap. I like California's method of "to sell it here you have to have this but we're not going to sue you for selling a noncompliant product elsewhere."
Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.
I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.
> Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services
It's been a while since I left Europe, and I'm rusty on that particular layer of civics. Do EU voters actually have a say in this kind of regulation? Or is it all decided on the executive side which is only accountable to member states and not to individual citizens?
It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in. Such as: - Chat Control - Vehicle regulations (mandates on "eCall", disturbing audio visuals and other "safety measuers) in Regulation (EU) 2018/858 - Eventual upcoming ethanol restrictions - Ban on plastic drinking straws - Drink caps that are stuck to the bottles - Ban on plastics with one hand, on the other handd there are huge plastic enclosers for batteries, scissors and in countries with a "green" profiles, such as Netherlands it seems impossible to just buy one or two apples - you have to buy a emplastered six pack of apples (lots of waste if I just wanted one apple).
Maybe this is just a fantasy, but drink producers were previously responsible for their "waste". Bottlers would pick-up and recycle glass bottles, but the onus shifted completely to the consumer - first with a glass bottle deposit, then with the advent of disposable plastic containers. Glass bottles largely didn't require a straw, unlike the latest frappuccino, which generally comes with a plastic container, lid, and soggy paper straw.
Instead of banning plastic bottles or unrecyclable plastic-lined paper cups (or, as you mention, apple blister packs...what?) where the vast majority of plastic resides, we now have paper straws to deride. Each time you peel your lips off a dry paper tube, you're reminded of your personal culpability in the global waste shell game.
The only viable solution seems to be to stop consuming (see 'fantasy' in the opening line). I'm guilty as charged, BTW, but will politely decline paper straws (I have my own stash of plastic straw contraband).
I don't even know whom they try to fool (apparently, they are succeeding in many ways...), but as you mention.. they (the politicians and institutions) complain about nanoplastics, and at the same time moves towards a plastic world. It is hypocrisy of many degrees. Milk containers used to be only paper, but now they are both paper and plastic for some reason. It's hard to find drinking bottles that are glass as they most turned plastic (I do, however, choose metal before plastic due to taste). Drinking straws.. in the super market it's now possible to buy "reusable" (Made in P.R.C) drinking straws for a really cheap price (that they are in practise, one time straws)..
the idea was to have less of those things people buy and consum on the way and throw them away and the wind puts them put of the trash and now shitload of plastic everywhere .... i switch between clean beaches in europe to cigarrete and plastic straw infested ones on other parts of the world. As a european i like thos clean beaches etc
The only solution? Not "carry a metal reusable straw around with you"?
Have to say I love the drink cap thing. It makes a lot of sense. The caps wind up everywhere so the regulation probably/most likely does some good (have not seen any data so who knows). But once you get used to it you appreciate not being able to lose the cap. Straws seem pretty useless to me in general so why not avoid plastic? but that is probably a me problem. Plastic on fruit is annoying as hell but it is not a mutually exclusive problem.
If you don't personally find straws useful that's fine but why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens?
To make matters worse the expected environmental impact is miniscule and the entire thing is predicated on a popular misconception that gained virality. It's a perfect example of the government failing to function well.
Is that really a perfect example of a government failing to function well? In what country government does every action require a direct vote? Representative democracy is by definition imperfect.
Bet you can think of a better “perfect” example of a government failing to function well. It all depends on which government you are referring to but the best example to me would probably be a government needlessly bombing another country. Not a ban on plastic straws.
Who said anything about a direct vote for every action? You're putting words in my mouth.
Yes, I think it's a particularly good example of government dysfunction. The issue itself is simple enough to easily make sense of and it's clear that it's a suboptimal outcome. The regulator should obviously not be getting caught up in nonsensical hype.
Don't confuse impact of the described action with quality as an example. The best examples of mathematical concepts are usually not particularly useful for anything in the real world.
> If you don't personally find straws useful that's fine but why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens?
That is cleary advocating for something as small straws being worthy of a direct vote.
Is there a reasonable expectation for government to be mathematically optimal in any possible way? Why should I not confuse your example as an example?
>"why should something like that be dictated for everyone else let alone at such a high level of government and without a direct vote by the citizens"
Not the user you were replying to, but they clearly asked why it was done at high-level, and without a vote; you are completely focusing on the latter, and ignoring the former.
I am not sure I agree with that comment, but you shouldn't straw-man it.
Don't know where you get your apples but I can buy 1 if I want. Just not at the supermarket since they optimise to sell you more than you need. No regulation involved here.
I believe it was both in Albert and Aldi (during 2023). Felt really awkward to waste fruit, but that's nice that there are sanity among other stores. I get it that folks can be annoyed when I hand pick my potatoes at the grocery store to match for size and to have good coloured exemplars, but to pick and choose is one of the few delights buy groceries.
I can also buy 1 at the supermarket
Care to share your secret?
The ideal solution for all this is would be what the Japanese have: a population trained to just throw garbage in the bin instead of on the ground. I don't think I've heard any politician who is even considering measures to get there. He would get my vote.
> It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in.
Well... your government certainly has a say in Brussels. Often enough, national politicians use "Brussels" as a scapegoat... nothing can happen in Brussels if national governments (or the Commission) don't propose it first, the Parliament has no right to initiative.
If people would stop electing dumb fucks to national governments or to at least hold their dumb fucks in national governments accountable (yes, it is possible, even Hungary managed to do so), you'd get a lot less "Brussels" bullshit.
(And yes, I am aware, this statement is particularly ironic given I'm German and we were utterly infamous for shipping off utter wastes of space to Brussels)
> and in countries with a "green" profiles, such as Netherlands it seems impossible to just buy one or two apples - you have to buy a emplastered six pack of apples (lots of waste if I just wanted one apple).
That's a Dutch specialty. Here in Germany, I can buy single apples, pears, bananas or whatever just fine if I want - although I don't because apples suck.
If I were to guess, it's a logistics thing. Sixpacks of apples are easier to handle and transport than a bunch of loose apples.
Not sure where you live in the Netherlands, but where I live we have plenty of places where you can buy single pieces of fruit. Maybe it changes per supermarket.
>Do EU voters actually have a say in this kind of regulation?
Barely.
>Or is it all decided on the executive side which is only accountable to member states and not to individual citizens?
It's decided by a mix of unelected bureucrats and opaque procedures people track even less than their national politics.
They do have a say. They can elect representatives who could change the legal framework and the incentives for the bureaucrats, or even remove the ability of the bureaucrats to regulate certain things. Then these regulations would not get passed and that would be that.
We have a say at a 4th level of derived decision, which is 2 levels more than what people call a democracy. Also, the other political party will do it too.
= We don’t have a say. We voted NO to the new EU treaties in 2008 and the new president decided that electing him meant that we approved the same treaties.
They only let us vote when we agree, anyway.
The lower chamber of parliament that votes on the regulation is directly elected and can rewrite and amend proposals. The higher chamber (EU Council) is comprised from government (or state?) heads which are either directly of indirectly elected with a length of 1. The commission (executive branch) that drafts the laws that are amended and passed by the parliament is voted in by a parliament which is directly elected.
Where do you get 4th level of deriviation exactly?
It's even less direct than national parliaments, which already are a joke.
And the unelected bureucracy, careerists, and 2-3 big country interests pressuring others under the table, are driving the show...
It’s just as direct as national parliaments. Citizens vote for MEPs.
But MEPs can't even introduce legislation, they have to get all of Parliament to ask the European Commission to initiate legislation, and the Commissioners are pretty far removed from direct election. Nobody elected by the citizens can initiate legislation.
Please stop spreading misinformation, the European Parliament constituted by the MEPs has zero legislative powers.
Sure.
Not sure what other mechanism would be possible for creating a rule system like the DMA presuming that the EU countries remain independent. Treaties are too slow, and direct democracy on an issue this complicated is the realm of science fiction (see Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe for a take on this -- particularly the Demarchist faction).
Voting the world over is a joke. IIRC it was Carlin who said “if voting mattered they wouldn’t met us do it”.
People the world over: (die for the right to vote)
One comedian: LOL they only killed them to make you think it was valuable.
The Internet: (sagely) What a wise assessment by a wise man of wisdom.
Tons of people have died for a variety of causes throughout human history. It does not mean that the causes were not silly or deluded. (e.g religious wars, Communism, Fascism etc.)
Carlin didn’t say it was silly, he said it didn’t matter. Religion, communism, fascism were all world-defining ideas, and they very much mattered to those who fought for them and against them. What am I saying, “mattered”. Go check social media, they matter right now.
Well they weren’t silly but they were definitely deluded. They still are.
Carlin was excellent at delivery, but don't confuse clever delivery with wisdom.
> They can elect representatives
They cannot. The EU Parliament cannot pass, change or repeal laws. Its representatives can't represent.
If you mean elect national representatives, then the EU treaties were deliberately written to only give them one option - exit entirely and be trade sanctioned by the others as a result, who must obey constitutionally even if it's self harm and they don't want to do it.
The EU is designed from the ground up to look slightly democratic from a distance without actually being so. Ordinary people living and working in member states have zero influence over these kinds of regulations which is why stuff like the DMA doesn't reflect their actual legislative priorities, which according to polls for a long time are primarily economic and immigration related, sometimes climate.
If you look at how the political class treated Brexit, you can see why it's so hard to influence these decisions.
If it's not in the EU parliaments jurisdiction, it's in the EU council's. As a rule, all members states have to be democratic and you can simply vote out your EU council member i.e. your head of state. It is democratic.
The EU Councils decisions are taken in secret. You have no idea if it's democratic or not, nor does it matter even if they do hold a vote because by convention none of them ever campaign on the decisions they make there.
To see this, try and find out how Ursula von der Leyen ended up the most powerful woman in Europe. What qualified her for that, who were the alternative candidates considered, what was said during the debate and by whom.
You can't because the entire process was secret from end to end. Was she even voted on? Nobody knows.
Again, the EU is designed to pass itself off as democratic without being so. But so is China.
As far as I understand the council's votes are made public.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/how-does-the-c...
But the European Parliaments votes can be by secret vote, which is bad in my opinion, and ironic considering they're the ones we directly elect.
Ah but look closely at those votes - do you see anything strange about them? Anything at odds with the idea that they are being cast by directly elected heads of government based on national policy programmes?
Edit: Nevermind, I'll be more direct.
What you linked to isn't the European Council that has elected heads of state in it. It's the votes of the Council of the European Union. Yes, this naming choice is astoundingly stupid, and because it's never been fixed despite many decades of confusion there are many who speculate the confusion is deliberate. It creates exactly the kind of false appearance of democracy that's tripped you up here.
The European Council, the one with Macron, Merz, etc in it, doesn't publish anything about their decision making process. There probably aren't votes. They don't approve or disapprove laws, either. Officially they decide things by consensus. Unofficially nobody knows because they all swear each other to secrecy.
The laws are approved by the Council of the European Union who are, theoretically, still ministers from the different governments i.e. a vote on a trade law would have trade ministers. In reality, that's not how it works either. You can easily verify it. Here's a random law that got approved recently by the 'democratic' parts of the system, on "the welfare of dogs and cats and their traceability":
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9729-2026-I...
Obvious questions one might ask include:
1. Why does dog welfare have to be imposed on members via transnational law they can't change?
2. Why are nearly all the votes of the Council passing with 95%+ support, all the time? Aren't they supposed to be from different political parties in different countries?
3. Is it really plausible that elected trade ministers from all over Europe travelled somewhere, met and had a meaningful debate about dog welfare?
The answers are respectively:
1. It doesn't and shouldn't.
2. Because they aren't real votes.
3. https://agenceurope.eu/en/bulletin/article/13873/27/eu-counc... says "The EU Council adopted the regulation ... without debate." (note the same naming confusion in the EU's own websites - they use "EU Council" to mean the body that approves laws, which isn't the body made up of heads of state that calls itself the European Council).
This law was waved through by some low level civil servants on behalf of the ministers. Probably neither group even read it. As is true for almost all EU law: most of the work is done by lobbyists.
So, when people tell you the EU is a democracy because of the Council, think about that. Or just ask them which council they mean, because they probably don't know themselves. Fun fact: there's also the Council of Europe which isn't connected to the EU at all.
You're correct on me posting the wrong link sorry. Thank you for the detailed reply.
But I disagree slightly with your take on the secrecy thing. Many of those discussions are diplomatic or internal administration. It is normal for these things to be kept private even in domestic governments. As it can put the state at a disadvantage to have the matters disclosed publicly (the state acts on behalf of the people).
There seems to definitely be shortcomings in transparency however on legislative debates like you mention, and should atleast have a period of public consultation on all of them. Also the presidency sets the talking points and just ignore legislative proposals they don't like.
It is democratic but yes I 100% agree it's entirely open for abuse, and I'm sadly sure is being abused. Separately and unrelated, imo lobbyists should not feature on the system at all.
Legislative matters are supposedly not secret and appointments can be (whether it's wrong or right is a bit grey imo, and that isn't a good thing).
1. The European Council The European Council primarily decisions by consensus. However, where the EU treaties specify a formal vote, certain appointments allow for or require a secret ballot. When it is used: Secret votes are strictly reserved for specific appointments or personnel decisions, most notably the election of the President of the European Council. Legal Basis: Article 4(4) of the Rules of Procedure of the European Council states that a secret ballot shall be held if requested by any member of the European Council supported by a simple majority. 2. The Council of the European Union Because the Council of the European Union acts as a legislative body, its operations are bound by strict transparency requirements under the Treaty of Lisbon. Legislative Debates: When the Council deliberates or votes on a draft legislative act, the meeting must be public, and voting records are made visible. Secret votes are prohibited for legislative matters. Non-Legislative/Administrative Matters: Secret ballots are permitted only for specific appointments or selections to individual positions (such as nominating members of the European Central Bank Executive Board or Court of Auditors) if a member state requests it and the decision receives majority support to proceed secretly.
And dog welfare being across borders make sense legally (single market) and ethically.
> The EU Parliament cannot pass, change or repeal laws.
I suggest you verify that.
It's a constitutional fact. The most they can do is propose amendments to laws proposed by the Commission, but the Commission drives the whole process and isn't required to accept them (worst case, they just cancel the law and then try again later).
There is literally nobody you can vote for to if you want to repeal the DMA.
I had the impression they can amend and repeal them. I was wrong.
No worries. It's called a Parliament despite not being one by the definition of the word, specifically to create this confusion.
You get to vote for one of ~5 alternatives every 4 years. This then propagates to hundreds of decisions in a way that dilutes your influence to practically nothing.
The lawyers and the politicians make the decisions. You really don’t think it’s the common man or woman. So there’s a year or two year tape delay.
> Do EU voters actually have a say in this kind of regulation?
EU voters don't have any saying in any EU level regulation. The EU regime do basically what they want.
While the democratic process in the EU deserves its criticism, this is plain wrong. EU citizens can vote for the EU parliament.
And EU Parliament can't propose a new law. Or propose to change a law. How super democratic.
Yup, but laws have to be approved by the EU parliament and that's not just a formality. As I said, I do think it is valid to critizise that system, but what you stated is plain wrong and even when I pointed it out you wouldn't admit it.
None. The EU is getting more and more un democratic by the year. More power centralized in the bureaucracy vis regulations and other mechanisms.
You have anything to back up that claim, or is it just knee-jerk drivel with no evidence based on your feelings and distrust of scary government bureaucrats?
Why is chatcontrol being pushed every year by the european commission, while people and their representatives are in majority against it?
Besides given the amount of lobbying in the EU institutions, it's obvious that citizens don't have a chance against corpos with infinite money.
And how is that different from any other governmental level? Seriously, we in Berlin got a freeway that nobody I know wanted or wants. It's not the EU's fault.
In a classic democracy, the Parliament can repeal laws, unlike in the EU.
Because puritans gonna puritan and security services want to read your comms. That's like any day of the week everywhere since forever.
Do you have any evidence supporting the notion that EU decisions process is democratic?
EU has a parlement and a commission.
I value them a lot, happy that the EU didnt bend down to Apple.
If it werent for the EU, the companies would get away with all sorts of shit.
Is as if people forget companies are evil by nature and will fuck you any chance they get.
Meanwhile: EU pushing to snoop on private chats and US companies are pushing back.
Where do you think that lobbying money is coming from?
I'm curios what kind of shit specifically DMCA protects you from?
I think you mean DMA, not DMCA. DMCA mostly protects copyright holders. DMA is about protecting users and competitors from platform lock-in. Bending for Apple would just make that lock-in harder to challenge.
DMCA provides some rather important protection for service providers (including small-scale services like web forums, not just ISPs and web hosts) - it makes them not liable for copyright violations by their users, so long as they take down infringing content upon receipt of a DMCA notice.
But I agree, that's probably not what OP meant.
Doesn't "DMCA", make, well, the DMCA notice a thing?
Precisely. What it replaced was rightsholders suing web services (like a forum or web host) as a first resort, which was a much more cumbersome and painful process for all parties.
If it was more painful for the suing party, it was a good thing.
Now all it needs is send some letter to github and they take down content, no questions asked, how is that better? It is for court to decide.
> If it was more painful for the suing party, it was a good thing.
It's a lot easier for a large plaintiff - like a record label, a movie studio, or a software publisher - to file a lawsuit than it is for a small defendant like a web site operator to defend against one.
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I totally agree cookie banners are awful, but you could equally lay the blame at the foot of website owners who are so keen to track your movements across the web that they'll layer this awful UX on their users. No tracking cookies => no cookie banners.
In reality, website who don't have any tracking cookies, still hang this banner just in case someone would start harrassing them.
https://block81.com/blog/why-most-websites-dont-actually-nee...
That's been true from day one. So the question is, did you come up with the FUD yourself, or did you believe someone else?
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The FUD is claiming that those banners are mandated by the EU, rather than malicious compliance from the industry.
Just read the article.
EU "voters" don't get a say in any of this.
What are you talking about, DMA has passed in the parliament.
The parliament doesn't get to choose the laws it has to vote. The parliament can't repell a law, and doesn't hold the pen during negociations.
So the laws that Parliament votes on just appear in session magically? They're not written by EU citizens and politicians?
Yes, European Commission decides the laws. Then a “trilogue” negotiation happens between the Commission, MPs, and EU government representatives, but the MPs don't hold the pen on the final wording (Commission does).
MPs can't therefore repeal laws; they can at most ask the Commission to set themes on the program. The Commission is therefore strongly dominant, as it is composed of career unelected officials who can wait for a compliant Parliament to pass the laws they want and target MPs in negotiations. This is what they do with ChatControl.
Of course there are no checks and balances for the Commission officials, who are bureaucrats with an opaque agenda. The EU is a weak form of democracy, which is geared toward bureaucratic capture and legal inflation.
It's a bit complicated to feed more stability into the system, but then this gets hijacked by national governments as an excuse to never take any blame for any shit that follows. Everything good is us, sovereign entities and all that is bad is always the other people in Brussels. Even zo the people in Brussels are mostly deputies of the same people or just themselves, but 26x.
It's not true, the Parliament can't choose the laws it has to vote on. All negotiations are done behind closed doors, in a truly democratic and transparent manner, that allows us to lecture the rest of the world on how to govern.
The parliament can't choose the laws that are submitted, but it can and does change the text of it all the time. I don't think the actual discussions are ever public in any other modern democratic body anyways.
This isn't exactly true. They can't propose but they can amend. The final text has to be agreed by the commission, the lower chamber (the parliament) and the higher chamber (the council, which is heads of states).
They can't propose, they can amend, but they don't hold the pen, and the Commission can veto it. Seems really democratic, Stalin would be proud!
I'd argue the average EU citizen has absolutely no idea how any of the Brussels bullshit works in reality. We learned it in school once, very briefly, just long enough to learn it is a clusterfuck of chambers. We are told it is democratic, and that's it. Once you get older, all you hear is: Brussels forbids this, forbids that. The EU is ripe for disruption.
Tech companies are ripe for disruption and breakups.
Well sort of? The more right-wing we vote, the more room corporations and their cronies get.
As EU voter, I couldn't care less that Apple behaves like a spoiled brat when it comes to following laws it doesn't like, it is one customer they will never get.
I only use Apple hardware that is project assigned to me, my household is Apple free.
In fact, this applies to every single company that thinks they should control governments and not the other way around.
"Let's discuss how countries should bend their knee before supranational corporations"
Government and corporations are natural enemies, they are two halves of an ecosystem that must be maintained in balance. This is a good thing.
That's not exactly how I would summarize the current moment in time.
This OP article doesn't really go into it, but they did actually propose a solution to the divide, they just needed more time to develop it. The Reuters article is reporting on one person's response to the proceedings, which involve more details than this particular article covers.
For instance:
> To address those concerns, Apple designed a system called Trusted System Agent, an intermediary that would let competing virtual assistants safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI on EU devices. Apple also proposed launching Siri AI in Europe while rolling out the Trusted System Agent gradually over 18 months. The European Commission rejected both proposals, and according to Apple, did not agree to any alternative.
https://thenextweb.com/news/apple-siri-ai-eu-dma-delay-ios-2...
That only reinforces my argument. Apple could have waited, but they decided to go ahead now and bring it to the EU later when they can address the concerns. That's great, that's the law working.
> While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap.
Care to explain? EU is also a jurisdiction, so why would EU law be legal in other areas than EU?
Jurisdiction concept is not strictly bound by territory. Classic example is two parties based in two jurisdiction dealing with each other somehow.
Imagine there is a law in your jurisdiction saying if you hire a person there are rules A, B, C which are a bit inconvenient to you, the employer. What if you incorporate in a different jurisdiction where the salaries are higher but there are no rules B and C, but there are rules B and D. Then this incorporated entity offers to hire people in your jurisdiction, but not offer the higher salaries of the other one.
Which rules should apply? The answer, as usual, is -- "it depends".
I'm not talking about incorporated bodies, I'm talking EU law. EU decides what it wants in EU, not outside EU. Or am I missing something?
GDPR also applies to companies that provide services to EU citizens, no matter where the company is based.
This makes a lot of sense, because otherwise you'd get situations where Multi Corp X could claim, "Oh, but our Berlin office is actually offering this service hosted in Kiribati. We just happen to have German users" and not offer access to personal data.
Seen as enforcement is through fines, companies that do not have an EU presence are completely unaffected. So even if technically true, in practice claiming that there's global reach is false. Concretely, no one is going after a hypothetical Baton Rouge Herald for not providing an opt-out of data harvesting on their news website.
I know about that. These situations are logical, if you'd ask me. The OP suggested EU law works where all parties involved are outside EU. Like EU playing world police, or something.
And as a consumer, I am somewhat happy that a company says "well, then not" if it cannot comply with the law.
If the law makes sense, that I cannot judge in this case.
> And as a consumer, I am somewhat happy that a company says "well, then not" if it cannot comply with the law.
As a citizen, I find it both fascinating and disturbing that this is even a thing. Of course companies have to follow the law. Why is this even a thing? If the product fills a real need and the externalities are acceptable, that will be a demonstration that the law needs an update.
Yes. If a company in another country elects not to deliver a product or feature because of local regulations, consumers should take that up with their local legislators. That company has no obligation to sell something just because local consumers want it. And if those consumers want to bypass local regulations in some manner, that's their business.
Market pressure is a pretty strong obligation to their shareholders. I expect Apple to fold, eventually.
Possibly. At that point it becomes a cost/profit calculation. Maybe the EU is big enough to matter. Maybe it isn't.
Totally agree. Granting exemptions feels like trying to have their cake and eat it too. If regulations mean anything they need to be enforced so we can see the real downstream effects.
> I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it.
The idea that there is such a thing as "law-breaking products" when consumers ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO SPEND THEIR MONEY ON THEM is insane to me. This is authoritarian nonsense.
It is not the state's place to tell people what they should or should not be allowed to buy.
> The idea that there is such a thing as "law-breaking products" when consumers ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO SPEND THEIR MONEY ON THEM is insane to me. This is authoritarian nonsense.
Remember Silk Road? You could order cocaine, heroin, and even execution contracts, which the founder himself go caught doing. I don't think making something illegal to buy is authoritarian nonsense. I don't want people ordering a murder on me from Uber Hits.
> It is not the state's place to tell people what they should or should not be allowed to buy.
You will always find people willing to spend money on anything. The whole point of politics is that we have to draw a line between what people want to do and the effect that it can have on other people. To put it simply, if your freedom affects mine, then someone needs to decide how far you can go and how much I have to accept.
We commonly accept that scams are bad, even though someone might participate willingly, just because it is much more likely that someone is taken advantage of in a way that most people find immoral, for example. Even in bastions of free speech such as the US. That someone somewhere knowingly gave money to someone else is neither here nor there.
That is quite a libertarian point of view, and Europeans tend to disagree with it.
The most extreme example could be the legislation on weapons. A less extreme example could be legislation on food additives or PFAS.
In Europe you can still buy cigarettes everywhere, and gamble in most jurisdictions.
QED, Europeans don't tend to disagree with the basic principle of letting people buy things to harm themselves and those around them.
The most extreme example would be child prostitution or child porn, in my opinion. But I guess it would be authoritarian to deny people from purchasing such services/items???
The former directly infringes on the rights of someone else, so it's a bad example.
You should remember that according to a court testimony the whole European area (which goes beyond EU) gives Apple 7% of their revenue, whereas breaking DMCA may incur penalties of ups to 10% of global turnover.
Those numbers make withholding "risky" products a no-brainer strategy. Also, those numbers put a hard limit of how much Apple will want reevaluate their general strategy of tightly integrated first-party software.
Why do you keep bringing up DMCA?
> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a 1998 United States copyright law
The DMCA is a law in the United States, it's not related in any way to Apple's decision to not roll out Siri in the EU.
Which court testimony are you talking about? A quick google search suggests that Europe is responsible for roughly 25% of their revenue.
Edit: 26% of their net sales comes from Europe for Q1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
there's a difficulty in evaluating how much goes into Apple revenue because Apple mixes Europe (not just EU) and Middle East.
The 7% probably comes from a Daring Fireball article, based on misunderstanding some Apple communications, and which Gruber later had to backtrack
https://medium.com/luminasticity/when-smart-people-cant-reas...
Yes, I was coming from Gruber's article, thank you for correcting me!
Using an old AI to comment? What does the DMCA have to do with it?
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.
To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering.
I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.
> If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them
This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration.
The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bickering.
If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me
The EU isn't asking for more privacy. This is about interoperability and competition. They don't like Apple controlling the AI interface and want a portal. They want Apple to put a backdoor into their system to allow third parties to access the data. This is insanely difficult to do while maintaining Apple's super-strict (yay!) privacy policy.
> If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere.
Those are not equivalent statements. You're assuming that privacy is a one-dimensional quantity, so that anything that complies with "the strictest international privacy laws" automatically also complies with any other privacy laws. But this is not actually true. It can easily be the case that every national law allows some set of behavior (different sets for different legal systems), at the same time that the intersection of all those sets is empty.
DMA is a not a privacy-oriented law.
But Apple’s excuse not to comply with it is privacy-related.
How does that reflect poorly (or positively) on their privacy chops? The dispute is about a competition law, a law Apple is complying with by withholding this feature.
They don’t want third parties to be able the access all data on your phone. Do you?
Yes. There are two values (privacy and competition) that are directly in conflict here.
Its because the standard product development strategy is to get the product into the hands of users to determine value and iterate based on feedback.
The EU has rules that are expensive to implement correctly, so if you want early feedback from users, you release elsewhere first. It's a very rational way to approach it.
DMA is about competition, not privacy. Apple weren’t requesting a GDPR waiver.
Apple's concern is at the intersection of DMA and privacy. Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of data access that Apple has today would create privacy issues. This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple", but that would be less profitable, but would have prevented the request for an exception because Apple would be on an equal footing with everyone else, if all they could see was client-encrypted data indistinguishable from random bytes.
> Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of access that Apple has today would create privacy issues
But this is solvable. The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)
> But this is solvable
That's the crux of my point; Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model and/or considered user data to be a liability rather than a hook for service subscriptions.
> The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)
I don't consider this to be a problem, but the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly.
> Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model
Consumer-centered threat model is perfectly well served with on-device models and Private Cloud. What isn’t is interoperability.
> the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly
I agree. And at the end of the day, Apple is following the law. I am sympathetic to their position, however, that this isn’t something worth building and optimizing for at launch. If we wanted to be rose tinted, EU consumers will get a fully-baked product. (EU developers get somewhat screwed, but I suppose their offshore offices could start.)
> This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple"
I think that's uncharitable. Apple prefers not to have the data either, hence the preference for on-device processing.
So Apple doesn't want to compete? Cry me a river.
I could almost feel sympathy if it were something to do with some contract that Apple signed with their AI provider. Who's that, Google?
Ahh, a "competitor"? Yeah... cry me a river.
> This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration
This kind of approach is how startups justify everything, however for established companies this would be backward.
I get a feeling that Apple never wanted to do it. They already knew the compliance requirements existed and if they would have wanted to test things then the narrative could have that they are rolling out in other markets first and would roll out with compliance in EU later. Asking for exemption was a bet they tried to play here, they lost and now spinning the narrative.
Laws and strategy are not fixed, and public bickering is part of how they get optimized.
Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick a public fight with the regulator or legislator in question.
Just imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols delaying the market release of some of their models. Apple really is behaving in a very unusual way here.
And even though I don't like the implication of this (the law should not disadvantage anyone purely for being critical of it), I can't help but wonder how many fewer pages the DMA would be if Apple had engaged with its predecessors in good faith instead.
> imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols
Both of these happen. European banks complain about American securities law. And all manner of car makers delay releasing vehicles in America and the EU.
Definitely, but both tone and forum of the complaints are generally pretty different.
That’s fair. Apple bickers in the EU and U.S. It doesn’t in China. I have a clear preference for one set of political systems.
They aren't releasing it in China either.
Yet. But they are probably working with Chinese partners (including the government) on releasing something (maybe with Alibaba models instead of Google models, on a Chinese-local cloud rather than google cloud).
A quick check showed it is estimated that Apple gets about 18% of it's profits from China but only maybe 7% from EU countries (ignore Apple's definition of Europe!).
Maybe China is easier to work with - perhaps their rules are made clearer?
China has 1.4 billion people and they are rapidly increasing their wealth. The only surprising factor is that Chinese cell phone producers haven't eaten up apple's marketshare yet.
And they are framing the completely different in that case.
As I understood it, you prefer systems with less freedom of speech.
Then don’t deploy it for Pete’s sake if you can’t guarantee basic privacy.
> don’t deploy it for Pete’s sake if you can’t guarantee basic privacy
This isn’t about privacy. DMA is about interoperability.
I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.
> complying with all kinds of laws delays release in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct?
DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.
Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.
> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always
Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)
No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either. Ultimately it’s about the weight you can throw as well as PR. Probably easier for Apple to make the EU look bad and drag their feet on it. I imagine they’re still not thrilled about the Lightening->USB-C change
> No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either
Everyone constantly does!
> Everyone constantly does!
In the aggregate, I agree, but in tech things are pretty loose outside of California.
The same way they constantly do and don’t about the Chinese government I’d say.
Apple was literally the first major company to go all-in on USB-C. They shipped entire devices that only had USB-C ports.
If anything, I would wager they were happy about it. They were going to have to do it anyway, and it would inevitably cause friction for users who were already invested in Lightning cables and third-party devices. The EU forcing this just meant they could shift the blame for any negative sentiment onto the EU.
They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.
Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.
We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.
If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.
When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.
> This slows down deploying the system globally.
Good. Pretty much everything should roll out way slower.
So win-win. EU consumers get a fully-baked, slower-rolled-out product. American consumers and developers get to see it earlier, warts and opportunities and all.
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Don’t forget they’re already basically two years behind when they originally promised this stuff.
So whats the issue delaying a few more months for a worldwide release?
The only reason for this is to take a swipe at the EU and try to push some bad opinion on to them from their customers.
Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?
The point is complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere. Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
> Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it.
> complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere.
Oh no! Anyway...
Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product. That seems to be gone these days and end-users have garbage products as a result.
If, like me, you specifically do not want third parties inside the Apple ecosystem, Apple has done a great job. I totally hate the EU's insistence of tearing down Apple's walled garden. That is a huge reason I like their products so much.
Interoperability only requires Apple to allow third parties to have the same capabilities that Apple does on your device. It doesn't require you to purchase or use a third party service or device. It merely allows you to have that choice in the first place.
And I explicitly do not trust third parties with that sort of access. I am personally thrilled that they don’t and can’t have it.
Ah yes famously people do not want apps on their phone. (Which are third parties by definition)
> Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it
It makes sense if you’re prioritizing time to market and agility. Once you’ve nailed down your product, you can make it compliant for more-onerous jurisdictions. You see this in finance all the time, where the U.S. tends to have the tightest rules around e.g. betting and crypto.
> Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product
Because software shipped in a box. Also, compliance is orthogonal to how good a product is. Siri AI might be crap. It might be great. It might be almost perfect and then made great on second release. Everything slows down if the entire development process has to deal with open APIs and lawyers at every turn.
It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
> It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
It's also perfectly legitimate to legally require business to slow the fuck down and consider how the thing will be used or abused, to make the product not crash for even just basic usages, and to put real safeguards in place against problematic scenarios.
But no, move fast and break things wins the day every day in the US.
They have already launched two years late. Remember when we all had to buy an iPhone 16 to get Apple Intelligence?
Besides that, Google has shipped many (not all) similar features to Pixels in the EU and have been for years.
DMA has been a thing for 4 years.
Whatever Apple is cooking and however long its taken them, the DMA is not a surprise and they could well have been taking it into account from the very beginning.
These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality. The rest of the world will be happy to not allow third parties access to our data.
As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
> As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
As a small developer, you wouldn't fall under the DMA.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began,
If it were the case, Apple would just say it (with receipts).
> I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality.
As a European Apple user I am absolutely OK with not having these functionalities, which I am 100% sure would not even work as advertised given the company track record.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
The DMA was substantially finalised by 2020, and came into force in 2023. Apple's AI thing was developed with the full knowledge that it existed. The issue isn't personal data here (that'd be the GDPR, and maybe to some extent the AI Act). The DMA is about _competition_. The EU's issue here is that Apple is giving its own AI thing a level of access unavailable to other vendors' AI things, I'd assume.
> As a small developer
You are not covered by the DMA. You'd need an EEA turnover of 7.5bn and/or a market cap of 75bn, for a start. And you'd also need to be a _platform_. The DMA only really applies to a few companies.
> As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
Would you consider supporting US laws?
I’m happy to not have it if it’s not compliant, yes.
AS we all have complained, Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for, roughly speaking, forever. Their private compute cloud thing and the protocols that protect it have, I bet, been in place for years. That's what you are missing.
So has the dma.
The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.
> one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets
At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
> At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
I totally agree with you in principle here, but Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here (and in the other cases, like Mac mirroring) so I honestly don't see that happening at all.
This is purely a lobbying move against the EU to get EU citizens/politicians to complain about the laws and get an exemption.
And to be fair, Apple's business model is currently structurally incompatible with a lot of the DMA (which I personally think is a good thing), so they kinda have to fight it for a while.
That lobbying move has been tried how many times? It hasn't worked once. There is no disagreement along any political lines I can think of.
It's not that we particularly like the EU government here in the EU. But we do like when they make pro-consumer laws.
So, you do without. Easy Peasy.
> Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here
Yeah that needs to stop. This is kinda why the DMA was created in the first place...
It doesn't _have_ to stop - the features just can't ship in the EU while these requirements are in place, which is exactly what is happening here. The law is working as intended, just not in the way the proponents thought it would.
> the features just can't ship in the EU while these requirements are in place,
Yes, they can. Apple wields its duopoly power to try and bend governments to its will.
Spoiler: It won't work this time neither.
> Yes, they can.
Then why aren't they?
Because Apple decided you don't deserve them.
It literally is:
EU: users must have choice.
Apple: no.
Apple literally says that because they are required to give users more choice they will give users less choice: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/the-digital-markets-a...
> purely a lobbying move
It can be more than one thing. It’s a lobbying move, to be sure. But it’s also almost certainly a time-to-market and potentially cost-mitigation play, too.
I do take your general point here, but if you know you need to implement the DNA requirements then you need to build and plan for some of that well in advance of launch.
I guess I don't see how much time they gain unless they don't plan to ever release a DMA compliant version.
The cost is almost certainly in time, not staff
Yet, they chose not to. That also speaks for itself.
Having worked at Apple and similarly giant companies, the idea that "they have enough money to do it" is incredibly naive. Rewriting all the basic software primitives of the iPhone, or the Mac, or iCloud, or CloudKit, or choose whatever massive surface area this legislation impacts, is not a matter of simply spending enough. Doing so requires the time and attention of the very few subject matter experts who are able to competently do it. The true cost is to your strategy, your business plan, and your product roadmap.
So it becomes a purely business decision: Do we risk a 10% global revenue penalty to release this globally, do we release this everywhere the DMA does not apply, or do we simply not build it? And make no mistake, even if Apple moved heaven and earth to try to comply with DMA they are STILL RISKING the full 10% penalty if the EU decides against them.
Didn’t write “money”, wrote “resources”, but sure.
Yes, there’s a risk to releasing a product whenever you can be held accountable for that product. I understand that Apple seeks to be as unaccountable as possible.
So we ultimately agree with one another: Apple can do it, but doesn’t want to, for various reasons.
It's simply a prioritizing time to market over a global release. You tend to release into the most restrictive environments last and the most forgiving environments first, for obvious reasons.
They can, and if they had thought it was advantageous for them to do so, they would have done so.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.
Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.
There wouldn't need to be a redo if the products had been built with compliance in mind. This law isn't something new; it's been around for years now. Not taking it into account from the beginning with the intention of operating in the jurisdiction means there's definitely intention to skirt. Particularly given the previous issues in the same department.
No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would successfully fight the law in court, if they thought consumers would revolt, if they thought that they were a Special Squirrel who would get exemption, or whatever.
Does this put them stupidly behind schedule? Yes, and bummer for them, but I highly doubt that a company as politically savvy, legally savvy, and wealthy as Apple would do this "by mistake".
I wouldn’t want to try and develop a sandbox for an AI that could protect the user and yet still be useful. Having an AI act on your private data but only in the way you want is hard enough when it’s a model that you control on hardware you own. Having third parties running AI on your private data requires a level of trust that I wouldn’t want in the hands of random developers in the app store.
It’s not an enormous effort if you plan for it. They clearly knew about this, and could’ve afforded to plan for it. Their whole shtick is locking users in, and DMA is their nemesis.
> completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc
So Google chose to be evil, now they have to rip all the evil out and redo it from scratch. Can't say I have any sympathy. Should have done the right thing from the start.
Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones?
Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late.
Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.
Appples architecture prevents them from seeing customers data (see Private Cloud Compute documentation). Data that Gemini Assistant (not referring to the distilled version Apple uses) see goes straight to Google. Big difference here.
Weird to say it but the only assistant with any guarantee for privacy by design is Siri at the moment.
What prevents to have an API that requires something akin Private Cloud Compute from other providers?
Technically makes the implementation of other providers harder but in principle it should be possible, no?
Apple suggested that but was turned down.
What is the source of this claim that this is the reason?
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
The code is open source: https://github.com/apple/security-pcc
Doesn't mention neither the EU nor DMA.
> Data that Gemini see goes straight to Google.
That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.
I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.
And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.
I was referring to Google Gemini AI (their branding is horrible) - Google can see ALL of your interactions with their services - that's not what Apple gets to see
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
If the options are "launch in the rest of the world quickly and get to the EU later" or "launch everywhere at once years after the competition" PMs and execs are going to choose the latter every time.
Former, you mean?
Yes, indeed, I wasn't paying attention.
I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
The third option is: launch in a way that is compliant with EU rules everywhere. Except they don't want that as they want to retain their outsized market power.
That's not a third option. It is the second option they listed.
Are you sure about that?
https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...
100%, it's been almost 2 years that you can choose whatever you want.[1]
I run Perplexity in place of Gemini, but I can also run Claude and others.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/BgvxqQQ.png
Apple is just being the usual Apple being both an hardware vendor and giving it's own software advantages that competitors don't have and using the security bogus argument as always.
And yet, people believe that crap and jump into defending Apple as if being an Apple user is their identity, sad.
But read the article, the EU wants even tighter integration for third parties, so it’s not exactly like Google is out of the woods regarding the DMA and this.
That's not fully true. Lots of things get to Europe later (Gemini memories, though we have them now, Spark as latest noteworthy)
Or never. Like the majority of Pixel 10 on device AI features (image editing, magic cue).
Some features don't land in Europe because US companies can't handle the amount of languages. For them it is English and maybe Spanish or Chinese because they don't care how heybmake money.
Nonsense, Google is among the most aggressive when it comes to localization to the point of being oblivious.
I have not been able to switch language in Sheets since 2018, and I've changed any possible setting (even account language).
All guides are in English and I'm stuck with Sheets in Italian.
I have the AI image editing features on Pixel in Europe.
Why does systems are not designed take into account that compliance work?
I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith.
Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.
Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.
But EU has a pretty uniform laws, so this comes to just one issue: time. Did Apple start working on this feature before EU implemented the law? This might be the case, but even if it was after, they could start working on implementing that sooner.
It would be good for US companies to know that EU laws are not "guidelines", just as US enforces their laws on companies from outside.
Sure but we're talking about the unified law of almost an entire wealthy continent here. It's EU ffs. Not some small island country in the middle of the ocean.
This looks to me like yet another bet from Apple: "they'll buy iPhones anyway, let them wait".
Because of move fast and break things mentality. Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights, they would have reached nowhere.
> Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights
Bad comparison. Launching with GDPR compliance isn’t particularly taxing if you’re already complying with California’s CCPA. (You need your twenty-eight EU law firms on retainer, but the big firms package that conveniently.)
Copyright theft in AI, on the other hand, is a global phenomenon.
DMA is most akin to the U.S. system of designating financial institutions SIFIs and then putting a bunch of extra requirements on them. Almost intentionally onerous. Hence ringfenced to select large companies.
You're essentially saying that privacy violations are baked into the cores of these systems.
The DMA has nothing to do with Privacy - it's an anti-competition scheme. Apple is saying that privacy is baked in to their approach, and they can't ensure that if they allow every other AI provider the same level of access.
DMA is not about privacy.
Core not, but here it is. Apple designed the system in a way that the operator can invade your privacy. So if only Apple is the operator it is "OK", but if they allow other operators it is not.
> Apple designed the system in a way that the operator can invade your privacy.
Citation needed.
The truth is very often that it is long and hard not to do the work to comply but how to not comply or do complicated things to abuse of loophole despite being able to pass the law on the letter of it.
Especially in the case of apple or Google. Look at the app store situation. It is very straightforward to do the work for the whole thing to be open to any competitor. But it is hard to try to design and implement a solution to try to not break any regulations but still manage to keep users captive the maximum without having competitor entering our walled garden.
Meta research eng here
Yes, but also its much cheaper to build it in at the very start.
When we built pervert glasses research platform, if we'd just ignored the data privacy laws we could have built it much quicker. But, the only reason it took extra time is because
1) we had no idea what we were doing and
2) the lawyers had even less idea, so we had to do a bunch of reading and make a best guess.
Turns out the guesses were right, but it was painful getting the lawyers to understand.
It's also not a "two-pizza team" market.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Then you should have done it right the first time.
So, what are the chances they'd completely redo multiple core systems in the 18 months they asked for?
Exactly, and the prupose of these legislation was supposed to be exactly that : force companies to integrate privacy in the core of their products, not to create a list of items to tick.
I have a crazy idea: design the product with compliance in mind already!
Agreed, unless you specifically know how a regulator will interpret a broad requirement on a edge case it’s a lot of effort to even figure out what the plan is, much less implement it.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
What if I tell you that there's a surprisingly simple, straightforward and above all very cheap solution: don't implement privacy-invading or anti-competitive features in the first place ;)
Sure let me wave a magic wand and have a data center that can meet all these regulations materialize before us. Yes I'm sure every American tech company is tripping over themselves rushing to build data centers that are subject to European taxes and regulations for the exact same compute.
LOL, do you think Apple learnt about the requirements yesterday during the presentation?
Well if your product wasn't already basically spyware, it wouldn't be so much work to abide by privacy regulation frameworks, now would it? I have no sympathy for how hard it is for surveillance companies to adapt their exploitative business model to the EU.
So? It's also more effort to work everyday to earn a living than simply stealing what you need from your neighbors at gunpoint. But the law's the law.
As a European I'm conflicted because I think this particular set of privacy laws are overreaching bordering on stupid; but "exemptions" for one of the richest corporations on earth would be beyond absurd and infinitely worse.
This is a competition law, not a privacy law.
Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.
DMA is about competition not privacy. Apple has privacy concerns with complying related to 3rd party access to customer data.
Another aspect here is that even if Apple tries theirto best to comply, the EU could decide they didn’t do a good enough job and fine them 10% of global revenue. Honestly Apple just might not want to take that risk.
Privacy by design while making a seven-figure salary because you make people buy stuff they don't really need is quite difficult ;)
In this case it looks like EU is requiring to let competitors mess with Apple users privacy.
Not quite. It is up to Apple to design a system in which operators (even Apple) can't see your data. Apparently they designed it in a way that operator can see it (so it is cool if it is Apple, but not cool if it is someone else).
How can Apple ensure what other cloud models do in their servers?
Is this the new excuse for user hostility? Instead of "think of the children" it's "think of your privacy"?
More like „think of those managing the extended family IT infrastructure“.
Wow, Google must be a poster child for privacy then.
>These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
And yet Apple had no major issues complying to the draconical demands of the CCP to sell and operate there. Weird.
Also, it's not like Apple can't afford the manpower for this. They're not a hole in the wall mon & pop shop.
The new Siri isn't available in China yet either.
Or really anywhere, since it comes out in Fall. Unless you count developer betas as available of course.
It’s also only in English initially.
They can only do so much at once. And Apple is not a “hire an extra 30,000 people“ kind of company.
Apple usually rolls stuff out in stages. This is just an extremely high profile example.
Has anyone seen a recent LLM release that supports just one language?
Apple Intelligence supports a number of languages. They showed them on a slide in the keynote.
The new Siri is limited at the moment.
old Siri was always limited in that regard.
And Apple Intelligence supports just a fraction of languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, and Korean.
Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish have quite small populations compared Poland, while I don't see Polish there (37M). I also don't see Romanian, it is slightly bigger amount of people than Netherlands, and the rest from that list are ~< 10M.
Oh, well, at least I don't see Russian in that list.
With ChatGPT, or Claude.ai (or Deepseek, or local models) I can speak with languages that are outside of (traditionally) limited set of Apple. Because it all depends on what is on the web and web has magnitude larger set of languages compared to what Apple provides.
[dead]
It goes to show that privacy is not a priority. And it should be.
No, this is unrelated from privacy. The issue is that the EU won’t allow the new Siri because Apple isn’t willing to open up the system enough for 3rd party AI agents to get the same functionality.
Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.
Which I would argue is HARDER to do while preserving privacy.
Functionally the EU is requiring that Apple dramatically RELAX their privacy and security postures.
I’m sure Apple doesn’t want to cave and give OpenAI free access to the spotlight semantic db, the ability see what’s on your screen at all times, etc.
> Functionally the EU is requiring that Apple dramatically RELAX their privacy and security postures.
No. Interoperability doesn't require Apple relax their privacy and security postures. It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
> It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
Apple made it sound like their proposal for that was rejected by the EU. And it would be consistent with previous regulatory decisions by the EU for them to not want Apple to be setting the rules for how third-party interoperability partners/competitors ensure privacy.
It seems to me that the EU has a preference for protecting privacy with legal mechanisms, and generally doesn't approve of Apple's attempts to protect privacy with technical mechanisms because that inevitably limits interoperability with systems that aren't designed around the same restrictions and assumptions.
I’m sure they love it when Apple says, “Well… they COULD give us their models to put in private compute, but we’re not paying them for that and they’re not getting any more data than we get, ourselves. Which is exactly none.”
Would that be allowed under EU law?
Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?
Same as you wouldn't want every app to read your contacts or location. If we only had something to do that.
</s>
Part of it is also a certification circus.
For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.
Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?
It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.
Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.
> privacy is not a priority
Isn’t this less about privacy than competition?
EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.
I think you should elaborate a bit on that because to me it seems that EU privacy laws are actually fairly good at protecting privacy.
EU has some of the best consumer protection and privacy laws on the planet.
Their laws are basically the equivalent of if there is no code, there are no bugs. EU laws forces citizens to get no new tech, privacy preserved.
Man, if we had computers in EU we'd be really angry at your dumb false posts.
Uhm no, EU privacy laws are actually pretty simple: do not collect data you don't need without asking consent from a user first.
Which should IMO be the basic principle worldwide. But unfortunately in many countries, companies are more powerful than governments/regulators, so they get to grab everything they can get their hands on.
Also it does not matter what you do in the end. If you are Big Tech the EU will sue regardless and always finds an excuse.
Do you think this is a problem with the EU? I don't. I think it's a problem in the way that Big Tech operates: by function of theft and laundering of data, and by screwing end-users and consumers in favor of profits.
It may be a problem with EU regulations. It’s hard to see how Apple could be certain they had complied with the EU DMA law, given its based on vague outcomes rather than clear requirements with extremely large penalties. The fact the EU was only willing to require the DMA regulations be met by large foreign companies doesn’t inspire confidence.
And it’s not like there is a thriving tech ecosystem of successful EU tech companies showing how it’s done. So there is a lot of ambiguity on how companies can reasonably comply without huge risk of 10% global revenue.
As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met.
In this case it looks much simpler: Apple strictly does not want to open up the iOS platform to other competing agents, as they lose the monopolistic moat if they do. While making a true developer platform with good documentation is often hard and expensive, with the market access they'd get, companies would gladly jump on it even if it was badly documented as long as they have guarantees of continued legal access.
At the same time, this potentially opens up the entire worldwide market (imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork), and they probably made the estimation that keeping EU out is still better value (70% of the market all to themselves) than fair competition in the 100% of the market (I guess they estimate they might get less than 70% in that case).
Or they are hoping that EU customers will want Siri AI enough to campaign for a change, but I'd find that highly unlikely.
> imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork
That's not the case. it's merely software (exactly like my iPhone 16 lacking the promised AI features claimed at WWDC24).
Anyway as I'm now within the EU with phone I bought before moving to the EU, regional features (or restrictions) depends on the logged in account and device regional settings. Except physical considerations (eSIM design, actual radio transceivers). The hardware is the same thank god.
Yeah, Siri was such a poor solution compared to Google (and Google's is also poor in EU) that no one would make a campaign.
If Siri wants to be seen as anything it should first support every EU language and they can work from there.
Those requirements are explicitly on the outcomes because companies like Apple used to abuse loopholes in previous, non-outcome defined laws. They, as always, have no one to blame but themselves.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that because the legislature can’t anticipate how companies will abuse loopholes, they sidestep that by outlining the outcomes instead.
The issue I have with that approach is that I don’t agree with that approach to governance. I believe it’s incumbent on the regulator to define what is acceptable vs. disallowed in unambiguous terms.
This is a spirit of the law vs letter of the law debate. Europe in general (i know its not that easy) tends to go more towards Spirit of the Law. While the US usualy tends more to letter of the law.
A lot of regulation is legally defined in terms of outcomes. That in itself isn't unusual. Checklists of technical requirements are almowt always a derivative and a suggestion about a safe path to meet the regulated outcome. This is how "blessed" standards for e.g. medical devices work. This shields the laws themselves from overly technical discussions.
The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.
That’s a good point. So maybe another point of divergence here is that the outcomes of the DMA are rooted in inherently unpredictable market interactions, whereas a medical device standard depends on the device performance and characteristics.
I don’t think it makes sense to create an accountability framework for a company that requires the cooperation of the market, because I think companies should be in a position to either comply or be held accountable on their own merits
That is fundamentally how EU law works
The intent matters, not the letter of the law. No loopholes, no bad faith interpretation. Just do what the law wants from you, if you make a mistake in good faith, you'll be given leeway to fix it.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
Thanks for sharing this, I didn’t realize that there was a fundamental philosophical divergence here- you’ve really helped me expand my thinking
No loopholes, no bad faith interpretation.
The endless cookie banners would beg to differ.
> but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met
This is true of most things that involve legal. Laws are not code, in basically any jurisdiction they are subject to interpretation, and just because you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, doesn't mean an enterprising enforcement agency won't still come after you
EU laws are written like this to give companies maximum freedom in how they implement their solutions, not to lay traps for them to fall into.
The criticism reads like people who don't understand a high trust society - which I don't think is actually the case here, more like assuming that the foreign guys are bad guys.
"They really don't try to fuck you over if you engage with them in good faith?"
"Yes, really."
Apple might not want to risk 10% of their global revenue on whether EU regulators like the outcome of their compliance efforts. And there isn’t any real risk of an EU based startup competing in this space like there would be in China.
Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily.
But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
This is quite the contradiction.
> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
Maybe it's more because the privacy is largely marketing and helps with continuously shutting out competitors under the guise of privacy?
If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups [1] by default and not just when ADP is enabled, which only a small subset of users do. In fact, many technical people I know don't even realize that iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted. At any rate, this large hole opens a lot of data (including iMesssage) open to Apple, law enforcement, etc.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
[1] And iCloud Drive, and photos, and notes, and voice memos, and wallet passes, and contacts, and reminders, and...
Apple is one of the few tech companies that puts user privacy first, and any claims otherwise are deeply misguided. They pioneered things like iCloud Private Relay and privacy protecting cloud backups for devices.
Ironically the gaps you point to are things they have had to do to appease the European Union.
> They pioneered things like iCloud Private Relay and privacy protecting cloud backups for devices.
They didn't pioneered it, they just brought it to the masses. Tor was here before the Private Relay, and most open source backup applications offer E2EE out-of-the-box.
It's incredible how people are acutely aware how technically inept regulators are (laws affecting their personal use of technology) and how quickly they side with regulators when a law affects how corporations use/create technology.
If regulators suck at understanding tech, they are making poorly thought out laws for corporations just as much as they are for you.
Privacy laws are not complex, they only become complex if your goal is to actually skirt them.
Tax laws are also quite easy, tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay what the country you're operating in is owed.
Respectfully, it sounds like you just haven't dealt with any significant tax or regulatory tasks.
There's entire industries of experts who work on these tasks, and they don't just work for people trying to skirt the rules. I've hired people for both tasks and the reason was specifically to comply.
Not privacy, but as an example:
NIST, MS, and the security community all recommend against forcing people to change their passwords on fixed intervals. They should only be changed when there is an indication they have been compromised.
PCI requirements demand mandatory 30 day rotation intervals on user passwords for users with administrative privileges, IORC. Something like that.
They haven’t kept up. So until they change the rules you can either be PCI compliant or implement the current best practice. Not both.
Your example completely ignores the temporal dimension.
The best practice was to rotate your passwords, but we discovered that this led users to picking less secure and easier to remember passwords and patterns.
Once technology offered up solutions to problems like password managers and breach notifications, that recommendation changed.
PCI used to mandate password changes for in-scope accounts (meaning they have access to credit card flows). Now that MFA is widely deployed that requirement only remains for accounts that do not have a second factor for authentication.
If you were ahead of the curve and implemented strong password policies that did not conform the the PCI baseline, all you had to do was explain to the auditor why. Assuming what you were doing genuinely increased your security posture it would be approved.
They specifically addressed the temporal element:
> They haven’t kept up.
Other standards all used to recommend password rotation. Most have amended it to deprecate or even prohibit password rotation.
> Once technology offered up solutions to problems like password managers and breach notifications, that recommendation changed
It wasn’t just that.
The original recommendation for password expiration failed to take into account the human practices that resulted.
Everyone has worked in an office with passwords on post-it notes, or seen passwords numbered with sequentially incremented integers at the end. Password rotation isn’t merely a baseline level of assurance, it has a negative impact on security because of the effect it has on password hygiene. In practice, passwords that expire can be easily guessed by appending something to the end of the prior password. And they are more likely to be written down in plaintext.
Permanent, non-expiring passwords without MFA are stronger in practice than expiring passwords.
And where the complexity comes in is where you need to comply with PCI and NIST 800-63 at the same time.
would you say civil engineers are only required if you want to skirt building codes?
Someone has to understand the codes and how they might be applied to a specific project, and direct a project such that the outcome will comply.
Codes dont provide a blueprint for a house or a bridge. They stipulate features and properties that it must have. Design resides with the firm.
> Privacy laws are not complex
Privacy isn’t complex, compliance is.
> Tax laws are also quite easy
Yet audits are still a pain.
> tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay
This is nonsense. Tax lawyers are sometimes used to skirt the law. They’re much more often there to help prove you followed it.
The exemption Apple wanted was not from a privacy law, but from the DMA. They never claimed to have an issue meeting their privacy laws when using their own product, it was other people's products that they said they couldn't guarantee the privacy of.
Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
You mean they wanted there to be no confusion whatsoever that they wouldn't allow competition in their ecosystem.
The exemption requested was temporary.
The 18 months was to entrench themselves in favor of other players.
EU response said it was "for a minimum of 18 months" — does not sound temporary to me.
How is that not temporary? "Ok, you asked for an exemption for a minimum of 18 months, we're granting you what you asked for, an 18 month exemption".
By now, Apple has accrued years of malicious DMA/DSA compliance. After those 18 months they'll try to find another reason not to allow competition.
Besides that, the law is the law and the DMA/DSA has been around for years. Why should they get an exception is one part of a duopoly?
That's even worse, then. They are not responsible for other companies' products. So this is just another piece of anti-DMA propaganda then. They have been fighting it loudly and with toddler-level arguments since they became subject to it.
A huge part of Apple’s marketing, whether you believe them or not, is that they try to protect your privacy.
The smartphone is probably the most sensitive device most people own. It knows your location always. It has your banking apps. Your password manager. Your instant messages, and social media chats, it knows whether you’re walking, or driving, or talking on the phone, and to whom.
Once Apple allows any other vendor to vacuum all of that intensively private information out of an iPhone, Apple becomes indirectly responsible for potentially massive privacy breaches.
All of that happens only if the user chooses to do it though. Anybody is free to stay in the caged Apple garden. The EU just wants them to leave the door unlocked.
A door with a lock is different from a wall with no door. Same argument that gets made with government-keyed or government-breakable encryption schemes: it's better for everyone to not have the backdoor at all.
It's not a backdoor. It's a front door that can only be opened from the inside when done correctly.
That's flatly not true. imessage interop means not just the person who installs the other app, but the data of everyone with whom they message loses the security/privacy guarantees created by imessage and Apple as a corp. Including massive resources pointed at securing the app itself.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea from a competition point of view, but good ideas can be discussed w/ an honest view of the quite real downsides.
Apple could have worked with other companies to make RCS secure by default instead of building their own little thing that openly and intentionally discriminates non-members of their club.
Deliberate bad faith is about right.
Apple was not the problem for rcs; the carriers are and were.
> They are not responsible for other companies' products.
Legally, maybe not, practically it becomes their problem.
No, this isn't the claim.
EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.
Apple says "We can't do this in a privacy preserving way".
You can definitely question what their true motivations are, but it seems pretty plausible that there is a moral case for this system to not be opened up to other providers who may do a worse job at privacy than Apple (especially when you are Apple and you trust yourself).
I think there is a place in these sorts of ecosystems for privileged players. If you buy an iPhone you implicitly must trust Apple to some degree.
> EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.
Not sure this is the case. My understanding is what the EU wants is that users can use Siri AI or a third party AI service from, say, Anthropic or OpenAI, at the same level of capabilities, just as you can switch default browsers. It's not about the underlying LLM (that would be the huge privacy concern), it's about the product built on top. Of course how a third party AI gets its data from the device would need to be approved by the user and that third party AI provider would have to justify what it's doing with that personal data to the EU watchdogs, just as Apple would need to do.
>But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.
You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.
Lemma 1: you want to protect your users privacy, and are also beholden to regulation enforcing that commitment (GDPR).
Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).
Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.
This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.
I am not sure this is as much of a tension as you make it sound: where is the obligation that a marketplace administrator will be blamed for any and all breaches of data privacy trust from a participating (likely malicious) third party?
According to GDPR, the app developer is the "data controller" and thus ultimately responsible. Only in the case where Apple knowingly participated in unlawful behavior is it likely to be held accountable, and even then, in addition to the app developer. Obviously, if we are not talking about leaks from the actual App Store system (eg. Apple account logins and user data).
So while it sounds plausible, the legal framework is exactly not what you describe here — Apple can claim to want better protection for customers by not allowing third party apps, but EU rejects that (it can similarly extend to app store itself) and pushes for competitive landscape with DMA instead.
Apple certainly is held responsible for such breaches by the public. And, believe it or not, I think they feel responsible for protecting their users.
But this isn’t a normal app. Apple is the one handing over all the data to the AI service.
Couldn’t someone argue that they “knowingly participated“? Do you think they want that risk?
Like they now hand over all your contacts, your location, calendar entries, microphone access, camera access. If you choose to do so.
Nothing holds them from having designed this as an API that others can use where the user has permission toggles of what data they want to share with the LLM provider.
This is clearly very different from usual permissions and access.
This would be unprecedented access to user data, enabling the most complete user profiling ever.
Ad companies, like Meta and Google, are going to spend huge amounts of money getting agents ready, because there will be a ridiculous amount of money behind all the data they're going slurp up, and the profiles they'll build for you.
Unless, Apple can figure out how to keep the leaches, that have consistently proven to be so, with court cases for receipts, at bay.
Interestingly, they claim to have done this and offer it as an API layer (Trusted System Agent) for other agents to use.
There is just this minor point that their own agent simply doesn't use it and goes directly to lower level interfaces nobody else gets access to: exactly the thing DMA was designed to stop.
1: If you want to protect user's privacy, you collect no personal information, so GDPR doesn't apply.
2: You do that.
3: Since your platform collects no private information, they get nothing from you. If they collect private information on their own, it's their job to comply with GDPR.
What you should do in case (3) is ask the user for permission to allow the 3rd party access to private data on their device. It's their choice (not yours) to allow it or not.
This is the smartest summary in the post
As has been pointed out elsewhere, DMA isn't a privacy regulation. It is simply about competition. You can be in 100% compliance with DMA and poor privacy protections. This is the crux of the problem. How do you preserve the privacy of your customers while complying with regulations where the simplest path is to compromise your customer's privacy?
The issue here isn't EU privacy laws (which Apple has been historically quite good at complying with, by big tech standards); it's EU _competition_ laws.
> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws?
The DMA and the GDPR are laws that at their core make each other more difficult. the stated outcome of the DMA - allowing any vendor/user full access to your device - is not easily supported when solving for privacy.
A popup that's like "do you want to give app XY access to this data?" is really not that hard to build... It's a lazy excuse, nothing more.
And then most users soon have given permissions to a ton of apps with sketchy records of protecting user data, so what was the point of even trying to protect privacy?
To give the users a choice? It's not Apple's responsibility to protect the users if they want to opt out.
By that same logic, we should all be locked up in padded cells to avoid getting hurt.
You gotta let people make their own choices.
There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law
Protecting user privacy and reducing surface area for litigation against the business can happen simultaneously. Not that it is, but just saying, politics and difficult to define thresholds muddy the waters.
Apple is providing a level of privacy far beyond what the laws require. It would be easy if they only wanted to comply with GDPR and DMA.
Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.
Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous.
The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior.
Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).
I am perfectly ok with EU having different rules of their own but they also can't be upset when features aren't offered there. That is the trade-off they have chosen and I am ok with it.
People in EU are upset that Apple is saying that EU would not let them build it, not that it's not offered there.
Phrasing it like that that without mentioning the $40B penalty if Apple releases the feature today feels a bit off to me.
Nobody in the EU would have been upset if they said: we cannot offer this in the EU because we want to shut out competitors from providing alternative LLMs and this is not allowed in Europe. Fine. I don't care.
Many Europeans are upset that Apple blames Europe that they cannot implement this because it would sacrifice privacy. (Which is kind of ironic, because the EU has nearly the best privacy protection worldwide.)
Apple doesn't care about privacy. By default (without ADP), your (i)Messages, Drive files, contacts, calendars, backups of data from third-party apps are not end-to-end encrypted [1]. US law enforcement can request it. EU citizens are not protected because the US can use the CLOUD Act to demand the data. If Apple really cared about privacy, they would have closed that hole long ago.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
I think that's exactly what people would be upset about as it was the impetus for the DMA in the first place.
Ah yes, famous EU privacy protections like Chat Control or ProtectEU
That's how the EU enforces its laws - a fine that hurts. How else would you like them to it?
You are agreeing with me. Apple would be violating the law by releasing it.
Thus the people that are mad at Apple for saying the EU is trying to stop them releasing this feature don't have much ground to stand on.
Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.
"Onerous requirements": users have the right to chose, users have the right to privacy.
Correct, they can choose not to buy an iphone. Also, in this case, the EU regulations are undermining privacy.
> choose not to buy an iphone
That's not really a choice. Hint: duopoly
> Also, in this case
You can't claim regulations to be onetous and bot onerous at the same time
> Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.
Do you never install software on your desktop computer?
True hacker spirit here.
> But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy
100% - just like Apple making such a grandiose show of "privacy". "Privacy" for Apple eventually led to Apple specific and Apple-only allowed ads in first party apps and now Siri connecting to Google servers.
Indeed. If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iPhone backups by default. But since they don't, US law enforcement can request my iMessage chats because the people I talk to (probably) do not have ADP enabled (which enables end-to-end encryption for backups).
I think there's a reasonable question of whether the Siri stuff is even a feature that customers want. Additionally, money can not solve all problems, 9 people can't make a baby in a month, and if these sorts of regulations are serious at all like they are for medical regulation then you really do need to do the work of assessing risks, etc., and there's a chain of waterfall development to all that.
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Does a baby build itself? No. Does the mother build the baby alone? No.
I don't think you can call the process unrelated to the mother or the baby, they're both pretty important throughout the whole thing.
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> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
The one legacy in Apple that Steve Jobs left behind is their distaste for taking risks that lose them money (ChatGPT was going to be their AI core... but then they had Altman ousted, so they backed away and partnered with Google instead), and spending money. I think they're still the only company with a kitchen in the valley that still makes employees pay for their own lunch, and the reason is the most BS reason that Steve Jobs pulled out of his rear end. It's so the employees appreciate the lunch, really?
Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.
I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.
> Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.
People can also appreciate things they get for free though. I'd appreciate a free lunch, most places I've worked at, actually nowhere I've ever worked, EVER has given me a free lunch. Now if its a difference of paying for a quality lunch at a reasonable price, and not paying for lunch but its mediocre, then yeah, seems like a no-brainer.
I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs implemented was a way to get them back into the green.
Also, TIL:
> Jobs, who notoriously took a salary of only $1 a year, used to "scam" Apple out of free lunches by scanning his badge alongside colleagues and insisting on paying for everyone, knowing the charges would just default back to Apple.
Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.
> let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)
And you’re saying that consumers would be incorrect in thinking that?
The market regulators don't give a fuck if companies screw over their customers privacy wise, as long as it's to the advantage of European companies and European customers.
This can lead to absolute insanity as companies try to satisfy both privacy and market conditions. It's not simple. How many years did google waste with Sandbox?
I’m glad this is at the top of the comment chain. I’m also angry with myself that I kept reading other comments. As you say, the current situation makes sense. Apple made something they way they want, the EU says it doesn’t pass muster with their laws and so Apple doesn’t release it in the EU.
Siri AI is just one of many AI products that aren’t released in the EU. If people are mostly happy with that then I guess things will continue as is. I do find it a little odd that so many people are championing the DMA as a beacon of consumer choice when it seems to be limiting what consumers have access to.
In the end Apple is a business and the EU is a dwindling market, they have to choose smart.
Seeing how abysmally bad is Apple with all AI related, they are doing us Europeans a favor by having Americans as alpha testers.
> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.
That's disingenuous. It's not about money, it's literally about engineering velocity. The amount of planning and engineering required for an entire interoperability layer that also ensures security and privacy is absolutely going to be something like a year-long engineering effort minimum. You can't speed that up by adding more money.
So it's either try to get an exemption to deliver this feature to Europeans while that work gets done, or wait 12-18 months for the work to be done -- work that isn't required to launch in the rest of the world.
Apple just wants consumers to be happy and be able to use their features. But the EU is requiring a ton of additional interop engineering, so consumers will just have to keep waiting and get features 1 or 2 years after the rest of the world, or never.
EU should mandate open alternatives to Siri on Apple
They should use siri to code it quickly, no?
This has the "do you even know who you're talking to?" air from Apple. Everyone should comply but not us, we're too cool and too damn important.
so you think its just a matter of ppl working through paperwork?
seems a bit simplistic.
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It sounds like the work on the privacy layer was significant and to give "equal" access to other competing AI systems, they would need to include that "for free" as part of the platform. Or they could try to keep that as the moat for Siri AI, and only offer privacy "entry points" that other agents can tie into, but vendors would have to implement privacy preserving functions themselves.
This is the bit that's likely hard, because generally keeping safety and privacy guarantees as data flows through the system is extremely hard, and Apple would not be able to guarantee it for other products without large review investment.
But ultimately, they probably just do not want to do it until Siri AI gets a decent marketshare first, so competing agents would have to both build new solutions for the platform once open, but also deal with an incumbent dominant player already on people's phones.
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Please don't post bombastic, inflammatory comments like this on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I understand Apple's position on this one. This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data. It is also a very useful feature. The EU regulators are disallowing guardrails without which this backdoor will be used to strip-mine people's personal data. The privacy implications are not legible to most people.
If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the encryption doesn't have backdoors for the government but this gives you access to all the same data.
When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.
It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.
The way Apple Health exchanges data with 3rd-party trackers (Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) is very well built and a good model of how other components in iOS could allow data exchange with very granular permissions.
Apple touts the "Private Cloud Compute". If they found a way to share your personal context to process on their cloud in a private and anonymized way, there is no reason the same process couldn't be used to handoff data to a 3rd party AI provider.
The technical problem is nothing like exchanging data with fitness trackers.
One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.
Indeed but you ignore my second paragraph: they have developed (and 3rd-party audited) a way to handoff all the data (parts of your Personal Context, etc.) to their cloud servers in a privacy preserving way on-device. Why couldn't the same process could be used to handoff the data to a 3rd-party AI provider? (genuine why, if you have an understanding of the thing you have a strong opinion about I'd genuinely appreciate the answer)
It looks like Apple is framing this as a privacy issue as a marketing tactic so that consumers will blame the EU when Apple COULD implement it without endangering privacy.
Apple PCC is using completely mad and paranoid amounts of security down to hardware and firmware level making sure nobody at any point of the supply chain can access the data.
EU can’t and won’t enforce the same rigour for 3rd party cloud AI. Which is the problem for Apple.
If said 3rd party service leaks private data, guess which company is going to be in the BIG HEADLINE and which one will hardly be mentioned in the news?
Ah, I see. I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device. Thought the server-side could be quite generic. Thanks!
Naturally the server needs to know things.
If you want it to, for example, summarise your HRV or menstrual cycle you can't anonymise it or you don't have any data to analyse. It'd be just "wink wink nudge nudge" with zero context.
Of course, but the iPhone could send slightly altered data to avoid fingerprinting (tweaking age / weight / height slightly) like browsers do with sensors.
Some data could outright be replaced (names, etc) and swapped back on device.
It couldn't do it with ALL the data (eg. calendar data needs to be accurate) but just because you need to give context doesn't mean sacrificing privacy.
Everything would go through an Apple proxy before reaching a theoretical 3rd-party provider.
These wouldn't provide privacy GUARANTEES but could make it reasonably difficult and expensive to fingerprint?
They've just announced PCC for Google Cloud using Nvidia GPUs and Intel CPUs so it would probably run on just about anything -
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
Of course Google has the capacity to run PCC. This isn't about whitelabel PCC being run by FAANG.
This is about Super Private Benoau AI being available for any user to install. How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not? The home page says that they're the best and mostest private ever of course, has animations generated by Claude and everything.
But actually it runs on servers bought from Hetzner's server auction and stores all logs in plain text in open S3 buckets and the owner actively sells the user data to the highest bidder.
This is what Apple is worried about and EU either doesn't care or doesn't understand the issue.
> How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not?
How can you know whether Apple would actually respect your privacy or not? If it's on-device you can audit it, but how can you prove their cloud is actually respecting your privacy?
If you have an answer to this then why can't third-parties also do the same?
Third parties don’t have to do the same. And they won’t.
And Apple has to? Why? What forces Apple to do this?
Nothing at all. But they do it because it’s clearly a priority for them and something that’s currently part of their corporate ethos.
Would it be better if something forced them to? Probably so! But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
That's exactly my point. It's just the reputation they've built.
> But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
This is the part that bugs me. Reputations are earned. Ask yourself: would Apple allow another entity to deploy their AI assistant on iOS if they respect user privacy at least as well as Apple? I doubt it! Apple is not doing this as a kindness to its customers - it directly benefits Apple as an excuse to lock competitors out of their platform.
This argument would be a lot more compelling if there was literally any company out there with an interest in doing this sort of thing that had even remotely comparable a track record to Apple.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Perplexity, and everyone else in this space are openly brazen about how much of your information they want to consume—however possible—to store in perpetuity and use for whatever future purpose they want.
In this space, sure. AI only exists and is improving because of extensive data collection. That's why Apple licensed models from Google. Anyone can go and download and run open-weight models, and many allow commercial use. If Apple opened it up I'm sure you would see new options which respect user privacy pop up.
Just look at Apple's stance on third-party web browsers to see what I'm talking about. There are browsers which respect user privacy, have good security, etc. but Apple uses the same excuse there: only Apple can be trusted to do it right.
Now the issue becomes opening the door only to the few entities that can be trusted. It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
This is one of those situations where multiple overlapping incentives all point the same way. In this case, Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway. Particularly since they seem to be the only large player taking this approach.
> It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
Which benefits Apple because it gets rid of competition on their platforms.
> Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway
At the cost of your freedom. Sure, it's not that bad now, but I'd be worried about the future of macOS because it's the least restrictive Apple platform right now.
> EU can’t and won’t enforce the same rigour for 3rd party cloud AI. Which is the problem for Apple.
Why should they? If the user decides to trust a third party, Apple shouldn't retain veto power for the customer's choice.
This is how macOS treats apps like OpenClaw. It can absolutely work for iOS too.
But how many users are legitimately capable of evaluating how privacy preserving a random Cloud AI provider is?
Let's remember that a tiny company called Meta had a "VPN" they provided for users that just happened to spy on them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39881962
And that went on for a long while before it was noticed.
Now imagine the same situation but an infinite whack-a-mole of alternative AI providers and just regular folk who will install mobile games from a frozen baby ad...
> But how many users are legitimately capable of evaluating how privacy preserving a random Cloud AI provider is?
Probably the same number of customers that are legitimately capable of evaluating the privacy of Apple's PCC?
Let's not forget a tiny company called Apple that once proposed Client Side Scanning to "save the kids" by hashing your entire iCloud. Apple loves demanding the moral high ground to promote asinine surveillance mechanisms with no safety guarantees for their users. Senator Wyden is adamant that Apple colludes with the US government to surveil metadata and intercept Push Notifications. Apple's definition of "private" doesn't actually entail privacy at all. Many third-party services are better positioned to protect their users than Apple is.
So why should users defer to Apple's arbitrary definition of privacy? It's obviously bullshit. If you're a traveling journalist, protestor or dissident, you might end up like Jamal Khashoggi for trusting Apple's services to keep you private.
Ahh, Apple's client side scanning - my favourite topic. The Internet collectively dropped their IQ to room temperature levels (in Celsius) when this was "discussed". I think I was one of maybe three people in the whole internet who actually read the papers describing how the feature works. The rest went with just the headlines and immediately sharpened their pitchforks and dulled their minds.
Let's go through the process in detail:
- IF you had iCloud syncing on (which meant your photos were on Apple's servers anyway) they would download a pre-generated set of perceptual hashes of KNOWN CSAM. Like actual child porn, vetted and verified by humans. Perceptual hashing is a fun tech, look it up, super useful outside of this context too.
- Then IF your phone, independently, with zero connections to the outside matched MULTIPLE (they didn't specify the exact count) known child pornography image phashes those would be uploaded to Apple's servers. There was some cryptographic boogaloo at this point too that mathematically prevented Apple from decrypting the photos without enough matches.
- Then an actual human would look at "reduced quality" (can't remember the exact term) versions of the matched photos and determine whether it's some dipshit / bad actor forcing fake matches with kitten pictures or actual CSAM material.
- If the human verifier confirms that the person's phone has actual confirmed child porn, the authorities would be contacted.
---
And the basic arguments:
"but muh privacy!" - You needed to have iCloud syncing enabled for this feature to be enabled at all. Your data is already on Apple's servers, they could just scan them there. But to do that they'd have to be able to decrypt them, which means the authorites can force them to do it too. Apple didn't want this. Thus: local scanning. You don't want your photos scanned, turn of iCloud sync. Done. Bad Tim Apple can't look at any of your photos.
"But what if I get multiple fake phash match files sent to me and I save all of them to my photos!" - then you'll inconvenience a human verifier for maybe 30 seconds. You won't get swatted or put on a list anywhere.
Oh and Apple already "hashes your entire iCloud" - also fully on device. That's why your iOS device runs hot for a week or so after installing a new major iOS revision. They run the fully local ML models on your pictures in the background and store them - also locally - to a database where you can go and search for "dog" or "receipt". Adding a phash to match to a local CSAM database is a non-issue at this point.
Why are you so focused on continuously sucking off Apple and putting them up onto a pedestal as a precious baby of the industry that can do no wrong and should have special rules just for them instead of _suing Meta into the fucking ground_ and making sure that this behaviour is punished in ways that make it never worth it to do ?
"Oh no, there's a bully. Let me just find a toxic relationship and hope they spend enough time bullying my bully so they forget about me" isn't exactly a recipe for success.
In Apple's press release[1], they mention proposing something similar to what you're talking about.
"Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU."
The European Commission rejected it.
1 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
> Why couldn't the same process could be used to handoff the data to a 3rd-party AI provider?
You have more safeguards if it’s running on your own metal. It’s reasonable to want to understand that better, perhaps with your own red team, before opening up customer data to actual potential hostiles.
Yeah I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device and didn't realize how much plumbing was required server-side too to have good enough privacy guarantees
The 3rd party firm is the one that wants the data. No need for someone to steal it from them.
Well, it seems they couldn’t do it that way, and that’s why we don’t get it in the EU. You’re talking about every app on the phone sharing pii with third parties. Yours, and those who share data with you. This is a completely different situation than health data of a single individual. You use that “COULD” as you were certain it can be done. Tell us how.
> It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.
You don't seem to know how backdoors work.
Oppressive regimes mandate that tech companies pre-install apps to protect people from spam calls, or install specific root certificates so they can intercept your traffic and insert a helpful banner into your browsing session to remind you when to pray.
The EU isn't going to ask Apple to add DataCollectionBackdoor(). They are going to demand that in the spirit of freedom and happiness EU companies must have access to Apple users private data.
What?
You want Apple to anonymize a users data, then hand that users data to a third party who knows who the user is? I don't think PCC is doing what you think it's doing.
> This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data.
This is the rhetoric used against right to repair. "What if enemies get access to our citizens' data if we allow anyone but us to repair your car?"
I have never seen this argument against (admittedly I'm not big into such debates) right to repair, did it came up somewhere?
Yes, it's what the opposition literally does. Go read some press pieces from these neoliberal moderates:
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/weighing-the-risks-of-righ...
The hypocrisy is easily explained by the overall attack on ownership... you dont own your own data. you dont own your car, your phone, your pc. Everyone wants to own all your stuff...
> I understand Apple's position on this one
Well then explain me this: There are absolutely no restriction on MacOS where I can give Claude free access to everything. If you are a Mac and iPhone user that essentially gives it access to the exact same data. Why is the data only protect worthy when accessed on the phone directly?
The Mac is a pre-existing platform that is both more capable than iOS, and had an existing user base that used apps that had much greater access. Apple’s attempts to lock down the Mac have met with poor adoption.
In exchange, it also less secure, less user friendly, and less popular.
There's SIP. Claude can't install kernel extension and you can. (... and it just hit me why Apple requires specific reboot procedure to disable it)
SIP doesn’t protect user data, and I’m not sure why a Siri AI alternative would need kernel access.
There is no one-click way to install an AI model on macOS like potentially iOS could have. I can easily imagine some grandma install on their iPhone some random AI model they saw in an AI-generated Facebook post with just one tap.
Laptops are a low security environment and already massively compromised. Thats why banks make you authorise transactions by approving them on your phone when you started them on the web.
Apple has been working for a while to secure MacOS but it’s hard without breaking compatibility with old processes.
iPhones have pretty good privacy controls. I don’t see how they can’t extend those to cover AI apps. I imagine the settings menu will get bonkers though. User education about apps slurping up all your data is needed regardless. People just trust apple with their talk of private cloud computing.
It would either lead to Vista-style constant UAC prompts or having to give blanket access upfront (which would be abused).
We have been able to choose our default app for 'assistant' on Android for a decade. It's fine. You can even revoke permissions if you want to.
And guess what ? Because you're allowed to choose something else than Siri, it doesn't mean you have to. You can still use Siri if you think it's better for your privacy.
What level of system access do they have? You can use 3rd party AI apps on iOS, they just can’t read app data or make actions on the system outside of the APIs that currently exist.
The new Siri has much deeper access to personal data and absolutely can not be trusted being siphoned off to a 3rd party server.
It is not prohibiting guard rails. It is prohibiting Siri getting preferred treatment to bypass said guard rails
Why do you use the phrase backdoor?
Is Apple incapable of designing a permissions system that allows a user to grant access to email and messages to an app of their choice?
We already download apps and grant them permissions to subsections of personal data on our devices.
I don’t believe Apple is incapable of designing a system that respects a user’s choices and granted permissions.
It is not a backdoor if I authorize some other app to use that data, it is a front door.
Apple thinks users should not be able to make the decision about who can access their data. It is not more complicated that that.
It’s a back door around normal app sandboxing and permissions systems. The security design of iOS was not meant to allow 3rd party apps to reach in and read any data from any app.
There is a 100% chance this would be used maliciously immediately. Meta would pressure users to install their meta AI agent, which would then go and read the users DMs, and create profiles on all the users who don’t even use Facebook by reading their data from everyone they talk to who did.
Personally I'd much prefer no siri access to app data than allowing evil companies like Meta/TikTok/Etc this level of access.
> This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data.
No. Only if you would consider the Linux/macos/windows filesystem API a backdoor too. On your desktop any app with sufficient permissions can read all your data. Would you call that a backdoor?
How is it a backdoor if I, as my data's actual owner, intentionally provide access to my data?
It's totally fine that Apple doesn't release this feature for EU customers. If they think they can still sell enough phones it's also fine I guess.
What's not fine, is to blame the EU for the missing feature. It's damaging their brand and damaging their reputation. Just think about if Porsche would make a press release and calling the US tariffs "un-American". Wouldn't be perceived well either.
You know what would also damage their brand?
Fancois Normal installing a 3rd party AI service which turns out to have zero security and actively just harvesting private data.
Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?
> Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?
The world I want to live in is not the one where apple claims responsibility for every byte of my data which passes through their products.
I think web browsers are a nice comparison here. Chrome added some nice security features (e.g. safe browsing) which are broadly a good thing for reducing harm from websites, but at the same time if you go to a dodgy website and they harvest all your personal details no one blames chrome for that.
No doubt AIs are an interesting use case because of the sheer volume of personal data involved, but if I want to trust some other AI app like gemini or chatGPT with my data then why should I be restricted from doing that?
Sorry, Apple has to be dragged, kicking and screaming to allow app store alternatives, that they charge offensive amounts for "to ensure your security" and has Draconian review rules on the App Store "to ensure your security".
Sure, 3rd party will get some shit. But if Apple neither protected me on their App Store _or_ on the app stores that they extort, what the fuck is their racket for? As long as Apple keeps this behaviour, they deserve to have their cornflakes pissed in.
[dead]
yeah that must be why Apple is so careful about restricting access to the same data when it is synced onto a Mac oh wait they aren't
You actually think that "syncing onto a mac" is the same as sending the data to a completely unvetted 3rd party cloud?
"I own data that may be stored on Apple's servers. Apple's operating system syncs that data to my local computer in a secure fashion. Apple's operating system exposes low-level APIs that allow other applications to access that data. I can install third party applications. Those third party applications can access that data and may exfiltrate it to an unvetted 3rd party cloud."
Your turn smart guy: Am I talking about iOS or MacOS?
Apple can only allows EU-based alternatives. Then the data protection is solely in hands of the EU commission and their vetting and regulation.
Problem solved. Next question?
> Just think about if Porsche would make a press release and calling the US tariffs "un-American".
Like this? https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/bmw-ceo-has-blunt-new-m...
I can't find the problematic statement. Off course the tariffs are a threat to the financial success of German car manufacturers, and they need to keep their investors updated.
The DMA is also threatening Apple's high profit margins. That's the whole point of the DMA.
Surely the point is competition, growth and a higher quality of life?
Or is it actually a crusade against margin?
It is multiple things at once. It's a typical antitrust law, to increase competition. Enough competition usually leads to lower prices and lower margins.
One thing it isn't for sure: "a crusade".
By who? The only US people who seem to like the tarrifs are the ones front running trades on their announcement.
Such political statements never damage the brand for every citizen, but for some.
Tesla is a good example. Elon Musk became political and anti-EU, which resulted in an irreparable damage of the Tesla brand in Europe. Not for everyone, but a big group of people would never again consider buying a Tesla. As a result Tesla lost market share in Europe.
Apple seems to be on the same path now.
More like EU became anti-Musk. And Tesla had great sales in the first half of 2026 in the EU.
Lol, no. Tesla might have "great sales", but other manufacturers grow faster.
edit: here are some stats https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar
I'd rather have my iPhone turn into a dumbphone than EU bow to the Megacorps.
Exactly. Apple is playing a dangerous game here, they damage their brand for many pro-Europeans.
I find it interesting that Apple prefers to fall behind in Europe rather than opening their platform a tiny bit.
It gives us European some opportunities. I have a side project at work that was heavily threatened by Siri’s new features. Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming there anytime soon.
But overall I doubt we will replace Apple.
> rather than opening their platform a tiny bit
Handing full access to the data on a user's device over to a company with the scruples of somebody like Facebook is a privacy nightmare, not "opening their platform a tiny bit".
Well, let that be my concern. Why should I trust Apple more than let's say Proton?
Because when you open it to Proton, you have to open it to Meta. And when Meta does Meta things, the first thing the average user will complain to is Apple - "didn't you advertise to me about privacy?!"
> Because when you open it to Proton, you have to open it to Meta.
No? You dont!? Why would you "have to"?
What’s the point of being forced to open something up if only to say ‘no’ to Meta? Can’t have it both wars. It’s either open or it’s not.
Why would you even consider buying an Apple device if you don't trust they will protect your data?
Because you don't trust Google either, so you're out of realistic options
Yeah, but you get to choose who gets to rip off your data. Joking aside, perhaps there would be some privacy focused alternatives and most importantly for Europeans, they would be hosted in the EU.
Isn't that ultimately the user's choice?
Apple could make settings for controlling exactly what is shared with the various assistants installed including Siri itself. No need for defaulting to full access.
Apple is not abiding, because they want to use time to really ensure they have the best assistant, before they allow competitors to build assistants for iPhone that can replace Siri (in the EU only probably)
EU rejected that. DMA says that 3rd parties must have the same access to data as Apple does, and obviously Apple does not want to turn Siri into a cookie banner party.
Europe is irrelevant in world affairs. It's an uncomfortable truth. They are not a powerful actor. I'm not saying this proudly. EU is idealistic. A political religion. They don't play realpolitik. Which is why the EU has no power. None. You can disagree. But you cannot ignore the truth. You don't have to like the nations that have real power. I don't either. But the biggest mistake we can make is turning our backs on reality.
Is there a way to downvote this comment? If Europe is so irrelevant in world affairs, then why is there a bustling discussion on this issue about who is in the right or wrong here? This is comment lacks good faith to argue against EU's regulatory power if this OP was going for
> It gives us European some opportunities...Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming anytime soon.
We've had endless opportunities to compete during Apple's entire 50 year existence.
As someone living in Europe I feel ashamed to read you openly admitting this. This sentiment would feel at home in the USSR.
Instead of trying to create things the world finds useful by building something better/cheaper/more innovative, we're choosing protectionism so we can screw our customers with inferior products they're forced to buy...and relax.
I think we've done enough relaxing in Europe.
We were the birthplace of the industrial revolution...the technologies of which went on to bring the entire world out of poverty last century.
Do we seriously have nothing valuable to contribute to the world during the entirety of the digital revolution? If not, I think our decline and collapsing social welfare systems are deserved.
Who knows? There has been a lot more attention to alternatives as of recently and there is more pushback against lock-in using remote attestation, Google/Apple Pay, etc.
It seems things start to get rolling in a way that they haven't since the start of the Google/Apple duopoly.
Opening up third party access to read all user data on the device, agentic control over all installed apps, etc. is opening the platform a tiny bit?
From the perspective of the user owning their own data and their own device, yes.
From Apple's strategy board point of view, no.
If Apple complied and opened up Siri like the EU wants, the only competition users could choose would be between US companies. DMA does not help EU companies.
It is entirely possible that Apple soon may loose EU market entirely once the Trump gets a relief in Iran and once again tries to invade Greenland.
Apple's services revenue is showing a strong growth and it is entirely dependent on keeping the ecosystem closed so that it can take its commission and sell its services.
Once things get moving they would prefer still having control on the on the US market rather than making slightly more money(if any. No one wants this AI stuff as you can tell by the strong sales Apple keeps having despite or thanks to not having AI integrated) when the EU market is still open to them.
In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law
[this comment is not available to readers in the EU in compliance with EU law]
[this comment is not available to readers in the EU in compliance with EU law]
Omg, I don’t now know how to cope without reading your comment.
It was probably really relevant and life-changing. Well I guess I’ll just get on the way I did before.
The same with Siri, I don’t need it and don’t care about some hyped up AI that Apple wants to push down my throat.
Similar to your comments, I don’t need it and if you (and Apple) don’t want to share or comply with the rules, well why should that make me unhappy? Or make me get angry at the EU?
FOMO? Pffft Joy of not caring!
it's denial all the way down, but i don't see the circle, hence i am denying to upvote ;-)
Well done EU for standing up to Apple!
The beauty of it is that in their exemption request, Apple claimed they have plans to introduce an intermediary system for other AIs within 18 months. So they can no longer claim that it's impossible for security reasons.
Agreed.
Moreover this claim stinks.
Apple have enough legal experience with the EU and technically competence to have baked EU AI, privacy and anti-monopoly compliance into their product from the start.
In fact any U.S. company could base their products on EU legislation, since it provides wide safeguards for consumer privacy.
Apple deliberately chose not to and are now being deliberately obtuse and misleading.
Anyone would think they didn’t have lawyers.
Either they are incompetent or it’s a deliberate choice to play this card. I don’t think it’s incompetence.
Why is there so much talk about privacy here? The DMA is an antitrust framework,the privacy argument is just the Apple spin of their refusal to comply
You mean DMCA. It is not an antitrust framework. Europe has pretty robust anti-trust framework. DMCA is an attempt to regulate companies that cannot be legally considered monopolies, and that do not run afoul of any pre-existing EU regulation.
Just for that case a new category of business classification was invented: the gatekeepers, and coincidentally almost all of those gatekeepers are American companies. Unlike antitrust regulation and other EU regulation that wan't based on clearly observed harm to the consumers, as otherwise that would have been covered by existing laws. It was solely designed to prevent businesses to have a potential ability to do something anti-consumer.
DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law. DMA is the Digital Markets Act, a EU law.
It is in fact an antitrust law. It basically argues (correctly in my opinion) that Apple and other companies have created new markets inside of their products. And in those markets they exert total control, including charging developers extortionate fees, forcing them to use their subpar and expensive payment systems or restricting what users can run on the devices they own & a lot of paid money for.
Sorry, my mistake. DMA. However, it runs counter to the definition of antitrust law, that is the law that applies to the trust or a monopoly, an entity that controls the market. DMA instead applies to the companies of certain size, regardless whether they have market control or not.
It's a matter of interpretation. From the DMA's perspective, the iPhone is a market and thus Apple has a monopoly on that market. Likewise they consider MS to have monopoly control of the Windows market.
That reinterpretation would have make Apple a monopoly and thus other anti-trust laws would apply, which did not happen. As I said: they are introducing new category, the gatekeepers, for the sole purpose of making the law applicable.
> EU regulators on Tuesday slammed Apple
This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.
Depends on the news you read I guess, to me the word "slammed" is pretty commonplace in politics news-reporting and has been for a while (read: well before the modern take-down content that's so common to social media platforms).
You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.
Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.
(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slams&year_sta...
> wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.
Could be, this is when social media was taking off and people chasing "viral" moments started to become a thing I guess.
I agree the difference is somewhat contextually nuanced, I had to check the usage of "slammed" as I know it to confirm my understood usage is a thing.
I agree it’s a bit sensationalist. Here’s the EU Commission spokesperson’s criticism:
>“The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU.
>“Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards,” Regnier said.
Obviously he's going to champion the EU's position, but his framing is internally inconsistent.
1. he claims the DMA doesn’t prevent Apple from launching products in the EU
2. the DMA sets certain requirements which determines whether features can ship in the EU
It's fair to say “the DMA doesn’t ban Siri AI,” but that's not the real issue. The regulation sets conditions, and Apple is arguing those conditions make rollout infeasible. The Commission claims its a compliance problem, not a regulatory block, but the reality is less binary. At a certain point the regulation is self-defeating. What is that point? This is the discussion that the EU lawmakers cannot acknowledge.
> the DMA sets certain requirements which determines whether features can ship in the EU
They can ship any feature they want, as long as they give users the option to choose alternative implementation of the feature.
Yes exactly, in accordance to the DMA.
"Compliance" isn't a thing without regulation.
> At a certain point the regulation is self-defeating. What is that point? This is the discussion that the EU lawmakers cannot acknowledge.
Because it's not self-defeating, what would that even be FAANG packing up and abandoning Europe? Worked out splendid for China.
You are likening the DMA to China's protectionist laws. China requires 51% Chinese ownership of domestic operations, adherence to CCP censorships laws, etc That benefits domestic companies nothing and foreign companies a lot. It's protectionism.
Whereas the EU laws apply to foreign and domestic companies alike, and the goal is consumer protection. The compliance difficulty does not vary between foreign/local.
This is a common sentiment of EU tech regulation proponents. You may want protectionism but that's not really what these laws are about. Why not simply adopt the CCP's policy towards technology?
Does not address Apple’s specific allegation, that the EU demanded that competing AIs have direct systemwide access to all apps and data, while Apple wanted to add an intermediation layer which Siri or competitors would plug into, and which would force the same level of user visibility (a popup at the top) over any AI’s behavior.
I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.
I think EU's position was that Apple can impose whatever rules and restrictions on 3rd parties as long as Siri is itself subject to ALL of those rules and restrictions. The restrictions were up to Apple to determine. What was not OK was to roll out Siri without restrictions yet impose them on other AI providers.
Good.
EU has the right to privacy.
Apple also has the right to not conduct business in EU.
If EU doesn’t like it, they can build their own sovereign software.
I believe that the issue was that the EU wanted Apple to open up their new AI agent interface (the ability to control every app on your phone so Siri can call you an Uber or whatever), and Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate.
> Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate
Oh come on. Apple doesn't want to give up control. That's what this is about. The privacy thing is just to make them look good
Nothing you wrote is in disagreement with the parent.
It's both but the dangers are far more issue for their brand than control
If they can comply with China’s unreasonable demands, they can comply with the completely reasonable EU demands.
They already claim to care about your freedom and privacy. Now they can prove it.
First they are not complying in China. Second it is sheer arrogance if not outright racist crap that China's demands are unreasonable but EU's reasonable.
Seriously EU folks need to come to down to earth sometime.
I would venture that Apple is going to go with something fairly different in China with Chinese partners. This is different from 3rd party access because they aren't opening up their phones, it will just be a fixed 2nd party solution (like they do with Google, except Google -> Alibaba, Google Cloud -> Shanghai Water corporation or something like that).
It's not launching in China either.
They are not complying with China’s demand either AFAIK.
This doesn't have anything to do with privacy.
The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.
But that does have to do with privacy.
Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.
So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.
Thats what Apple wants you to think. In reality it has nothing to do with privacy. Apple could let 3rd parties tap into these APIs but only after the user clicks away a big scary message telling the user they are leaving the comfort of the apple curated garden.
This allows competition, but also allows privacy for those who want it. See? Simple really, but Apple being Apple dont want to let 3rd parties use its AI APIs and so we have this standoff.
Big scary warnings aren’t a solution either. I watch the way my son interacts with consent screens and warnings, and it’s barely believable- the average person is very well trained to click through the warnings.
Someone might believe that people who ignore the warnings deserve everything they get, but I respectfully disagree. I remember helping my grandma uninstall and remove all the hostile browser extensions that had tricked her into installing them. If Apple is protecting vulnerable populations by taking the choice out of the users hands, even if it’s only profit motivated, I’m okay with that until someone presents an alternative that actually addresses those needs.
Apple is very good at “big scary warnings” that are also quite difficult to click through without knowing the correct steps to take. See also the EU alternative app stores, or running an unsigned app on macOS, or installing a device profile…
This is mostly wrong. The DMA has a process to determine if a service provider acts a gatekeeper to the market, and let's be honest if Apple is not one, then I don't know who else besides Google.. So there is no privacy argument in there except Apple didn't want to design a interface that complies and is safe.
Apple is using Cloud compute as well to enable Siri AI.
If you want to you could still use Apple or another provider you decide to trust - or even one that does everything locally. The competition would still have to follow GDPR after all.
Apple PCC has been independently audited to be ultra secure.
Will the EU enforce the same for 3rd party integrations?
If Apple had e.g. required competitors to undergo similar independent audits that would probably be allowed as it is quite similar to how Apple solved the third party app store issue.
Are we sure the EU would allow that? Or would it be seen as a way to stifle competition?
I mean, Apple's PCC audits require them to individually vet each auditor before they're allowed to see the PCC nodes.
If Apple extended that philosophy to other vendors then yeah, it would be deliberately unfair and anticompetitive.
It sounds like they are whitelisting the hashes of all the Google software and OSes and stuff to ensure nothing is changed out from under them without them knowing.
Even if you could make all the other possible vendors run private cloud compute style stuff that would be a lot to manage.
And I can’t imagine the EU would like, and as a user I would certainly hate, the “OK you can use Grok but you lose all privacy too bad“ dialogue box they could make.
I don't even think it offers a meaningful degree of security. It's a form of theater, you have to be hand-selected to perform the audit that Apple promised.
Most sysadmins know that hash matching only mitigates a small subset of rare upstream attacks. Apple could still be MITMing the whole thing (SSL added and removed here :)) and no auditor would get the chance to check. The offered audit is so weak that I would not trust any FAANG business to administrate it.
Apple is once again demanding arbitrary centralization to give them an undeserved veto power. None of this is for security.
If they're not "hand-selected", what would be the way to select the auditors?
Just have an open house for anyone interested to come poke the hardware and software?
Have a set of clearly-defined requirements that doesn't randomly reject valid candidates? Nobody wants another opaque system like the App Store review process.
By the sound of it, Apple's offered audit doesn't include insight into the most dangerous parts of a system like this. This could easily lead to a situation where real security experts are denied access to promote influencer-adjacent Yes Men who rubberstamp the hashes matching without any question.
Hence my concern for "SSL added and removed here" - none of Google's famously backdoored infrastructure will be audited. For privacy purposes, Apple's promise is woefully incomplete.
That's a very bad faith reading on what Apple said.
How I understood it that they want _actual_ security researchers, not some random dude who once installed Kali Linux and ran nmap.
It's state of the art private compute according to actual experts and everyone will be wasting their time if the "researchers" need to be coached through the process and explained the basics of the system's operation.
At this point the EU doesn’t trust Apple’s fair rules. Which is very much earned.
So if they did that here, I doubt the EU would accept it. And even if they did as soon as a competitor of any side/credibility cried foul I’m sure the EU would make life very hard for Apple to prove they’re not being unfair in even the tiniest way.
Siri AI has the capability to read your screen and access a lot of personal stuff. I don't blame Apple for not wanting to open this up to allow any model to access it. It seems Apple proposed a number of solutions which were denied.
While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.
We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones. Nothing about this is about choice or the free market. They want special treatment.
Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).
> We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones.
Do you really? The only two types of operating systems for phones that you could reasonably use are iOS and Android. So it's either Apple or Google.
Imagine a world, in which you could only consume Apple or Google services on those phones. No more Netflix or Disney+ on iPhones - only Apple TV Plus because the streaming video API is not available to third party apps. I think there are plenty of other examples to demonstrate the point.
A free market doesn't work if you have a duopoly. A free market requires the freedom to choose between different services, which Apple is trying to limit by only allowing Siri AI to access specific OS interfaces.
Not sure why some people on hackernews support more locked down operating system.
There are phones running alternative versions of Android with no google dependency, and there are phones running linux.
Furthermore, if we lived in a world where the two main OS's were locked down to an insane degree, we would also have plenty of alternative operating systems. The reason we don't today is because we don't really have a need for it, in the same way linux has a monopoly on servers and nobody really cares.
> There are phones running alternative versions of Android with no google dependency, and there are phones running linux.
Those make up 0% of the market [1], which classifies Apple and Google as gatekeepers.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe/
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Them making the only phones anyone uses makes them the gatekeepers on what people do on their phones -> Apple and Google are gatekeepers under the DMA.
It doesn't matter how they became gatekeepers.
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The law says they’re gatekeepers. That makes them gatekeepers. There’s no point in trying to “well actually” this. The law is clear.
There are hundreds of phone models. A smartphone is a just one type.
Apple came out of nowhere and invented the smartphone because the existing system was controlled by the telcos and horrible phone technology. The same thing can easily happen again.
It makes no sense to limit Netflix on phones and people would probably stop buying iPhones.
If the EU wants an "open" phone ecosystem, they should foster real innovation in their space and build it themselves.
The EU is going to be China minus the technology.
> EU has the right to privacy.
Sure - the DMA has nothing to do with privacy though, so that's a straw man. or is it a red herring? I always get those confused.
EU does not want privacy. They actually want to get rid of privacy every so often (adding backdoors in encrypted conversations). So far it has not worked out, but I’m afraid they will succeed at one point.
To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh.
I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an European would really much like my government to stop asking ridiculous things that do not profit the consumer.
Believe it or not, the eu is not one single entity with one undivided goal. As is perfectly well demonstrated by chatcontrol being proposed by one side and continually struck down by the other.
Why is everyone conflating GDPR with DMA? DMA is literally the anti-thesis of GDPR in that, by design, it makes the ecosystem less secure, not more.
Why would the EU want an EU company to make a phone OS with a massive privacy flaw?
Good for the total of eight users that will then use an alternative agent once it landed. Similar to the twelve people that use alternative app stores.
Why make fun of freedom?
Have some dignity. We all deserve the right to fully own our general compute devices.
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I’ll bite, why do you deserve this “right”?
Because if you call something a right, then anyone who disagrees with you is a fascist. It's simple.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/news/apple-s-improved-6-step-...
> Prior to Apple's update, around 65% of users attempting to install the Epic Games Store on iOS were thwarted by Apple's deceptive design. After the update, the drop-off rate has gone from 65% down to around 25%, and continues on a downward trend as users upgrade to the new version of iOS.
The whole point is to try and avoid ending up in situations like this, where apple were able to extort 30% of app store revenue because they dictate how people are allowed to use their devices.
AltStore is hugely popular, and that is DESPITE Apple going out of their way to scare people into using the App Store.
> “We have hundreds of thousands of users,” AltStore co-founder Testut told TechCrunch in an interview. “Wonderful and good numbers.”
Zero idea if its true tho.
AltStore works across the world, only in the EU it an Apple-approved storefront. Is it the total number? Also, is the number of store installs?
it's still being litigated wrt to alternative app stores: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/04/epic-games-asks-u-s-supreme-c...
the core technology fee is a big obstacle to alternative app stores.
openclaw is massively popular. there is a lot of diversity in "persona" agents, which are different than coding agents or the agent apple demoed. they're not all the same.
i don't know, i don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.
Pretty sure F-Droid has more than twelve users.
DMA is one of the worst things for tech and innovation. The EU is aggressive time an time again with its interpretations of the DMA.
DMA is killing innovation by, checks notes, not allowing Apple to lock out competitor products from competing on an even playing field?
That's fine, good actually. I wish these companies would go further tbh.
Like when the UK banned encryption I wish Apple would have just disabled iMessage entirely there. Show a message saying that due to UK law, they cannot operate an encrypted messaging service there any longer. The backlash would get that law changed pretty quick.
Instead they disabled encryption for the UK, making all of us less secure.
There is a saying "American trust companies more than their government, Europeans trust their governments more than companies" when nobody should trust either.
Sometimes a company's incentives are going to be aligned with their users, but a lot of the times they won't and consumer protection regulation is useful.
Sometimes a government will have the good of their citizens in mind, and a lot of the times they will seek money and power just like companies do. Lobbies, fines, overreaching regulation.
The UK (and EU's attempted Chat Control) is some fascist bullshit. But allowing you to own the device you paid for and use it as you please (including letting you install whatever software you choose to) isn't.
What is the countdown to Germans outraged when someone from outside the EU is walking down the street and catches a fleeting audio clip of them which is processed by Apple's AI?
Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?
For context, under German law recording spoken words without consent is illegal. There is some nuances when speaking in public loud enough for strangers around to hear though
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
It's a geoblock. EU accounts can use the features when outside of the EU.
Interesting, I would have guessed the opposite as geoblocking is not perfect, unless it's using location services as well.
There is a 2-week delay too, if you arrive in the EU you will still have access to the features for two weeks. When you leave the EU, it will take two weeks outside to gain access to the features. At least that's been my experience having a EU account and living mostly in the EU. Might be different with foreign accounts.
Interesting how the "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute" cannot rollout due to privacy laws
The DMA is not a privacy law.
Yes because DMA doesn’t force 3rd parties to be groundbreakingly secure.
Literally anyone could whip up an AI service, get people to use it and just browse the unencrypted logs for data to sell.
Which is the issue Apple is having.
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Have you considered that the EU's privacy laws may simply be onerous and burdensome, and the fact that a web of red tape has caught another fly may not actually reflect on the privacy claims of "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute"?
I think OP didn't question the privacy of their Private Cloud Compute, just Apple's bad faith: they claim they can't handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to 3rd-parties when they tout that they absolutely CAN handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to their servers.
Apple frames this as a privacy issue when it's only a brand/control issue.
That’s right, they can hand it over to their servers. And they’ve got special agreements with Google to do the same exact thing. That preserves privacy.
Is it possible to do that with absolutely any company that wants to be able to be the AI on your phone? Are most of those companies even capable of handling something like that?
That’s thorny.
Yeah I overestimated the PID stripping that was being done on-device before being handed off to a server. After other comments I realize there needs to be a lot of plumbing on the server-side too.
PCC is supposed to work only on Apple silicon. You are supposed to trust that the input will be decrypted within the enclave which is next to inference engine on the same box. This way you know the input does not leave the server. If they offload to another server (eg google) then the privacy boundary is broken, once it leaves the enclave. Microsoft does it differently, where inference is confidential so more guarantees if that could be replicated.
Google has a similar thing they announced a year or two ago that uses the various hardware security stuff in the PC world that Apple is working with them to add to the list of approved stuff that gives PCC level security.
Europeans support that by and large. So either agree or have no ability to sell. This idea that companies know better about their users’ needs including privacy and choice is ridiculous. Apple is not a small company which is bullied as well.
put quotes on privacy laws.
Reading the EU commenters' opinions is strange to me.
>Good! I'm glad I can't have new and improved!
In the US, we basically see this as a shakedown by foreign governments against our successful companies. It really is a matter of "build your own iPhone" you guys. You had Nokia, so don't tell me you can't compete globally. I'm pretty fed up with Google and Apple personally, so please do deliver me a nice EU phone with sd card, removable battery, unlocked sims, usb-c, and all the other nice things your regulators demand.
There are two things here:
Allowing Siri competitors. EU is 100% right to demand from Apple to give the same data that Siri has to any other app (competitor) that the user chooses to install, trusts and has granted access. The grant should be the gate keeper, not Apple.
User privacy, data retention, pii, etc - I am not 100% sure here - if you send user data somewhere to a LLM, it gets very complicated, very fast, and probably the rules should be revisited / simplified / relaxed.
There is a widespread expectation here in the EU that every vendor in the world wants to access the common market and thus will accept any regulations and limitations that come with it.
Given that our share of global GDP has dropped from 25 to 17 per cent in twenty years, with a steady downward trend, I am not convinced that this principle will hold for much longer, and this case of Siri may be one of the canaries in the coalmine.
If/when we drop to single digits, many vendors won't likely care anymore.
> Europe accounted for nearly 27% of Apple's total sales in its last fiscal year
I don't know about every vendor, but Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales.
> Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales
They’re not going to over a single unproven feature.
What could Apple/Siri be asking for an exemption from that Google/Gemini has already complied with? Accessing iCloud photos to edit them? Parsing email etc?
google/gemini has not complied properly to DMA in android AFAIK
Probably not, but it's still available. The DMA most likely would require the ability for users to be able to benefit from to the AI regardless of which email/photo/messaging provider they prefer to use.
Apple still tries to integrate its own software deep into the phone and hope to get market share that way.
I am really glad someone is putting a stop to this behaviour. Regardless if it is Microsoft, Apple or someone else trying to force users to their products with no choice.
I really don't get why this wasn't a requirement that was baked in since the beginning.
Apple must know that they have customers in EU countries..?
They’re already two years behind on this. And they’re only launching with one language anyway.
It’s not like the feature is fully finished.
If it took another year to get out the door and be compliant, do you think they would’ve wanted to wait? Or do you think they would rather launch now and then provide a compliant version later?
Big tech companies have gotten used to laws not applying to them.
Of all the crimes Big Tech is committing against humanity, Apple's attempt to safeguard user privacy is the one the EU cannot abide?
it's more Apple's attempt to prevent users to choose their own models. Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index. They could implement a big warning that shows "if you proceed with this request, Spotlight will send this and that to the model provider." But Apple chose not to do that.
> Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index
How? How do you safely handover effectively every single bit of data on someone’s phone to any third-party company and preserve privacy?
Sure you can try and demand agreements from the third parties but will the EU see that as a move to limit competition?
Ignoring all other concerns it is a rather thorny problem.
I don’t think the EU would accept, and as a user I certainly wouldn’t accept, having to agree to a pop-up every time I used any feature that used any data on my phone that might go to a third-party AI.
If you decide to upload all your data to $company, that’s your choice. I don’t see why a user shouldn’t have the choice to do that. People already have all their data with Google and Meta, so I don’t see why this would be an issue for many. It’s not Apples job to protect users from themselves.
Besides, opening up the API would also allow people to self-host their models and plug in their own servers instead of having to trust the whole private cloud compute project (yes I know, it’s verifiable by experts, but I as an average homelabber certainly can’t).
It’s important to note that this isn’t about privacy. It’s about freedom of choice, and the avoidance of lock-in due to monopolistic practices.
> It’s important to note that this isn’t about privacy.
Strong disagree.
Most people have no idea what someone could do with their phone's cumulative data.
And when Facebook offers to dramatically enhance your personal network experience if you just configure their AI engine into your phone's settings, how many will understand the impact of that?
Then that's an issue where GDPR steps in. Obviously privacy is important. But so is user choice. Again, this specific problem we're talking about here is about user choice. Privacy is a different concern entirely.
Is Facebook evil? Absolutely. Should people stop using it? Absolutely. Is drinking, gambling, eating junk food and smoking bad for you? Absolutely. Should this mean adults should not have the choice to do these things? Debatable.
Such a shame - in America they give you $95 for not getting Siri apparently
https://apnews.com/article/apple-iphone-siri-artificial-inte...
Apple will solve the issue as soon as they decide to monetize Siri AI with additional paid services.
Does this affect users that have a primary address in the EU or anyone with a phone that is _in_ the EU?
The APIs in iOS that turn feature flags on/off as you travel now have gotten insanely complex. Some are on time triggers, some change instantly, some depend on where your iCloud account was setup, AFAIK there isn't a black and white answer as to what happens when you move a non-EU iPhone through Europe anymore, "it depends". It's similarly vague in the other direction.
Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.
I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.
From past experience, it is when you are physically in the EU, but this implementation could obviously differ from how they've gated features in the past.
I have the complete opposite experience. Originally had a Canadian bought iPhone in Spain, had all the features a Canadian has and a European doesn’t (or vice versa). Upgraded to a Spanish bought iPhone and I am still a “Canadian”. I’ve been here for nearly 5 years but my Apple account is still fully Canadian (Canadian address, Canadian credit card on file). I think it’s Apple account location, maybe with some sort of system to allow people to switch countries but not allowing that to bypass restrictions? Or: that’s why a EU citizen can’t just switch their account location to unlock features?
I have a European account, when I lived in Japan I could use all the features (iPhone Mirroring, etc.) that are blocked in the EU. When back in the EU I can still use them for about 2 weeks before they get blocked again.
So does this mean if in the eu we get only the default dumb siri and wont get the new upgraded siri? Apple will need to keep old siri working? I never use siri because it it completely useless. It doesn’t understand a word I say.
The EU is only interested in interoperability and centralization of data so they can put their citizens under surveillance. I hope Apple continues to exit this market on the edges.
I don't think the GDPR came from an effort to surveil, but the world has changed in the last ten years and I do agree with this assessment today.
Ah yes the well known EU equivalent of the CIA, NSA
The one that’s so secret it’s not in any of the treaties that the sovereign nations that comprise the EU signed up for and implemented in line with their own democratic processes
That agency
Meanwhile they struggle to put together a border patrol, but advanced pan European surveillance apparatus that isn’t run by the US. Yeah bro
I don't think they were necessarily thinking of one EU-wide agency, but the recent attacks on encryption including Chat Control which almost passed, a lot of EU countries voting for far-right governments. I do believe we still have it better than in the US wrt privacy (e.g. we don't have Flock cameras), but we need to be careful considering what EU governments have been doing.
> EU governments
“European” governments. Non-european governments too.
By definition “not” the EU
Of course, but I'm replying to a comment that speaks like surveillance doesn't exist in the EU because there is not a European NSA, so I'm talking specifically about the EU surveillance risk.
> I'm talking specifically about the EU surveillance risk.
So specifically NOT MI6, GCHQ, the Swiss, Norway, FSB.
Only the members of an economic bloc that you envy.
Okay bro
One of the main rights enabled by the GDPR is to request to have data deleted, how would that facilitate surveillance?
As an EU citizen, I don't mind. I don't see how a voice assistant is more important than the rule of law.
Whatever, this is why while I like some of their technology, I don't support spoiled brat behaviour with big margins.
When your business model directly breaks the law, and the laws are enforced, it hard to have a business,
I in india patiently waiting for Siri.....
> Apple executives [...] said that virtual AI assistants would have unprecedented access to a wide swath of personal data on a user's device, including virtually all of their communications.
Is this supposed to be a good thing when Apple does it? That sounds utterly undesirable.
Tant pis
If the price for some sort of functioning Siri is my privacy, I’m happy with the current dumb Siri
Seems like a win for everyone.
yeah, we are talking about giving random apps gain full control over your whole damn phone and every file in the filesystem.
If I were apple i'd want to give people enormous amounts to tools to control that access. Specific popups whenever it tries to access data (for the first time) from any given app. OpenAI would like access to all of your text messages, yes/no. I'd also want audit logs etc.
The nightmare is facebook (or the like) releasing an ai model into the current facebook app and forcing people to decide between looking at their grandkids pictures or allowing facebook to read your whole damn life into a database. So perhaps these apps need to be mandated as a connector for Apple Intelligence and nothing more.
I mean if you decide you want to give access to Google to everything on your phone, go for it. So far I trust apple, they haven't let me down yet. Placing these models on hardware is a great trust-building feature.
From personal, separate experience with Europe. It's quite common that the market watchdog and the privacy watchdogs are at odds with each other and make it impossible to achieve a solution that satisfies both of them.
Another example here is Google Chrome - which still allows third party cookies because even thought the privacy regulator wanted them gone, the market regulator required them to architect a solution that was unworkable to not take advantage of their gatekeeper advantages when others didn't have the same rights as them. Google finally said fuck it, and walked away from the privacy features in order to satisfy the anti-trust regulators.
Not shipping this feature in Europe is a common way to deal with satisfying the balkanized regulators there.
Honestly with Apples high bar of engineers and their massive budgets. If they wanted to they would. So to me it's a good decision from the EU commission to not give into the bullying from Apple. (and others)
Can I assume the UK will get Siri AI?
it was never gonna roll out at the same time as the United States of America…
If you are, like me, one of the EU customers that are again disappointed by Apple's behavior, please take 5 minutes to send Apple feedback about that: https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone/
Or, write to your European MP.
To do what exactly?
Apple does not adhere to EU law. It's their task to either go with the local law, or leave their customers hanging. And I rightfully express my disappointment that they currently do the latter.
They do adhere to the law perfectly by not providing a law breaking feature. If you don't like the way the law allows that, you should address your complaints to the lawmaker.
I hope more companies start doing this. If Europe wants to have laughably stringent laws and micromanage companies it should be prepared for many of those companies to exit the market. Europeans can either stop being unreasonable or, you know, create their own bloc-wide champions.
What does it even mean to "roll out in EU"?
These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny. Let's say I have several citizenships, live mostly in the EU, but currently stay in Japan, do I get the features or not?
Like app store regional gating and DVD regions, these restrictions are dinosaurs of the past.
It's referring to legal jurisdiction, not anyone's personal relationship with nationality or residence.
You will get the features when you're in Japan, and have them for about 2 weeks when back in the EU, then they will be disabled until you leave again.
I mean, borders still exist, and laws apply within borders. I don't believe that national (or supra-national in the EU's case) sovereignty is yet a dinosaur of the past.
Good. I wish the US had some privacy regulations as well. I can't believe how much credit folks are still giving Apple after all the BS they pulled (I mean direct Ad revenue is a $9 billion (and growing) business for Apple, and that's just the stuff they make public, not including search share revenue and other such deals).
Apparently their "Verifiable Transparency" claim just means Apple invited unnamed outside security experts and independent researchers to inspect and verify the integrity of (what they claim to be) its Private Cloud Compute code... LOL :)
I'll believe it when I can run the "private cloud compute" on my own hardware that I can firewall in my rack and monitor its network outputs.
There is a way to implement this functionality in an interoperable way that complies with the DMA. Apple just chose not to. Not because it's impossible to implement it in a privacy-respecting way, it just wants to lock people into their ecosystem, the exact thing DMA is protecting users against.
Apple realized its standard malicious compliance playbook won't fly this time, so now they're trying to sway public opinion by not rolling out this feature in the EU. It won't work. They're just going to lose market share and will have to backtrack when they do. Tech regulation doing its job.
Too many bootlickers here now. Such a shame.
Revenge for killing Lightning port!
Should just bribe Trump again.
He will bomb Paris and London until Europe capitulates.
Two billion in bigly notes should suffice.
I wonder how ChatGPT or Claude are actually GDPR compliant, but Apple has problems with Siri.
What's to wonder. Those third party apps are not part of the core OS and others apps can't access them.
Because this is not related to the GDPR at all, but the Digital Markets Act (DMA). It's purpose is to enable competition and not allow big tech to abuse their market dominance (e.g. in this case Apple not wanting to grant any competition the same access to MacOS so that they don't have to face competition for Siri AI).
Oh. Could not access the Reuters post.
I'd instead wonder why Google and Microsoft seemingly don't have to comply with the DMA.
This isn't GDPR, it's DMA. They're not subject to it.
Always thought "butthurt" was childish. Looking at Apple no, it's appropriate.
We never had a working Siri so we can wait another few years. Not that it matters at all.
Meh US big tech needs to learn that laws are not optional
It's all bullshit anyway. Apple could design a privacy framework around a fully integrated AI subsystem, "Do you want to allow ChatGPT access to Mail? (Developer message:) ChatGPT can read your emails to help summarize your inbox, or compose new mail."
This privilege system already exists. This is just marketing.
>"Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards," Regnier said.
Damn, good luck next time. Maybe use some of the $416 billion 2025 revenue to invest into that project?
fair
Still butt hurt about usb-c eh.
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This is imperialism mentality, there are much divide in US politics and society but they seem to agree on trying to dominate and berate the UE in particular. I see it displayed even among progressive commentators it doesn't surprise me it is also reflected among progressive companies. But as soon as it comes to Trump or to China then it is not the same rethoric, stance, rashness at all. This selected stances and courages don't impress me at all. I also don't have much sympathy for Europe here, i guess Europe got what it deserves when you accept and do nothing to escape the fate to be a vassal you are rightfully treated like a vassal, nothing more.
EU loves to shoot itself in the foot. It will cease to exist in less than 50 years. You know its true.
EU doesn't come out looking good here. Clearly the onerous regulation is stifling innovation. It was always hard to argue otherwise, but the hits keep coming.
Apple stock is down more than 4% right now. That is a big dump for such a blue chip stock. IDK if it is due to this EU ban or Apple choice of going with Gemini (instead of making their own models).
Apple stock rises leading up to WWDC and then drops following the keynote every single year. People keep betting that this is the year that they're going to announce the next iPhone and the stock is going to 10x.
The whole market is down
But AAPL has a big weight on the market/indices.
They always go down after a keynote.
If the market is reacting to the Gemini news now, something is wrong. This has been a known fact for months.
Apple is right, EU wants to live in the stone age because of these laws, let them.
Right, wanting operability, alternative default apps, equal access to APIs is "wanting to live in the stone age". POSIX is the stone age model, and Microsoft is the future.
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Generalization. "You guys" who? Most people actually know DMA has nothing to do with privacy. There are ways to hand off PID-stripped data to a 3rd-party.
The DMA has never been about privacy. It’s about fair competition.
It would be nice if Europe had companies innovating at this level but it’s not happening. If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies, so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.
All I know is we are buying the same devices designed by the US but keep increasing the list of features we can’t enjoy.
> so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.
Says it right there: "Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards," Regnier said. "Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA - and this for at least 18 months. That's not an option."
> If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies
Mistral. I’d bet my bottom dollar that the French are the reason the EU is holding firm on its position.
Mistral is against these EU regulations. I bought a printed version of the AI act, it's 600 pages of absolute nonsense, with 5 mandatory committees on national, eu, company level; 12 steps 6 months processes to release a new features; daily reporting obligations to yet another committee. It's just not possible to release software with the regulations as they are written.
Honestly, it's probably more that Apple have been arguing about basically every single thing they are being made to do under DMA, amd the respective Directorate has basically no patience left for them at this point.
Never underestimate the power of a really, really, really irritated counterparty.
In other things Apple has absolutely been a complete jackass and deserves a very large amount of the smack down they’ve been getting. I’m sure that’s a part of this.
However they are also a 100,000 pound gorilla. If you fight with Apple over $ISSUE, even if they’re right in that case, you get headlines and possibly PR points. Lots of people here are quite happy to be mad at Apple. And other companies take notice that you’re serious.
If you argue with a tiny company from Spain, most of the world doesn’t care and you get no headlines.
Apple is complying with EU law by not releasing a feature that is not compliant with EU law. And the EU appears to be trying to make hay over that fact.
> innovating at this level
At what level? Improve Siri which is lagging behind, then add llms?
At the level Apple does, I mean broadly and their peers, there is not an European company at those levels.
Isn’t ASML something like it?
Apple tries to market its product as privacy-focused, yet the privacy of their new AI features is so bad they don't meet EU standards? Is that the message here?
It's the inverse problem. EU wants anyone to be able to install a different AI agent onto their phone with the same access as Siri. Apple says "no- we need time to figure out how that would work, we want other agents to meet the same privacy standards of PCC/on-device that Siri uses". Which EU said no.
I don't think there's a clear good guy/bad guy here.
Yep. Clash of priorities at a given time/deadline.
This one does not appear to be Apple being a dick, like they have been on the App Store and a number of other things.
I am not very sympathetic to apple here, but I think the legislation in question is more to do with competition than data privacy.
This conflict applies to many tools that require high privileges:
* If you allow the user to grant those privileges to third-party applications, they can grant it to applications that abuse it, resulting in security and privacy risks. You might even be blamed for allowing them access (e.g. the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal).
* If you don't allow the user to do that, third-party tools won't be able to serve those needs, which can be considered anti-competitive preferential treatment of your own tools.
The interoperability of their AI doesn't meet EU standards.
You've got to be delusional if you think the EU has a good grasp of AI.
So, first they have to be regulated because Apple and Android form a duopoly. Then they want to get an exception that the other duopoly player does not get.
Of course, as usual they use their PR machine to blame the EU, whereas they really just want to abuse their platform's position to shut out competitors.
I have been a decades long Apple user, but their anti-competitive behavior, pushing ads into the OS and apps, and their treatment of developers (who made the iPhone big) is just gross.
EU wants people to be able to plug any model into the new Siri system that will have unlimited access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc.
Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.
Very different than the narrative you're pushing
Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC two years ago, they had plenty of time to work on interoperability. Besides that:
access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc. Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.
The point is that if Apple's model gets all that access, they should give others access to those APIs as well, otherwise they are giving themselves benefits over the competition. A company can do that, but not once they are considered a gatekeeper in the EU. It's up to the user to choose an LLM provider that has good privacy rules (or stick with Apple if there is no other provider). That's fair competition, a user can weigh pricing, privacy, etc. and make their own choice. Now they are stuck with Apple and have to get an iCloud+ subscription to fully use the AI features. The 18 month delay is not to figure this out, it's to entrench themselves as much as possible first.
Following your line of reasoning, if Apple had this behavior in 2010-2015, instant messaging applications outside iMessage wouldn't have the option to ask access to your contacts (privacy), no possibility to share a location in a chat (privacy), no means to show notifications (probably privacy too), etc.
It's surprising how much people are willing to do the bidding of tech oligarchs. Remember, this is the company that has spent years doing malicious compliance around the DMA and DSA, why should they be trusted this time?
> The point is that if Apple's model gets all that access, they should give others access to those APIs as well, otherwise they are giving themselves benefits over the competition
Yes. They SHOULD. So how did they do that without throwing away their privacy promise or running afoul of the privacy laws?
First, LLM providers providing their services to European customers are bound to European privacy laws (GDPR) as well. If third-party providers violate the GDPR, it is not Apple's problem. Just like it's not the problem of Debian if you run Claude Code and Claude Code decides to upload your whole life (even though the OS provides the APIs to read the files).
Second, they could provide users with permission toggles of what users want to share and what not. Same as iOS/Android do now for contacts, location access, etc.
> it is not Apple's problem
Maybe legally. Customers won’t see it that way.
Having to prompt users the first time an AI accesses each of the many different data stores on iOS sounds like an annoying mess.
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Even when Siri AI is using a locally installed LLM (with optional cloud models with E2EE), the EU still decides that it is not even enough.
This is why the EU is destined to lose and run itself to zero.
This is about the Digital Markets Act, its not the EU saying it isn't secure enough, they are saying users should be able to choose to use the same functionality but with different AI providers.
Compliance with DMA would have Apple hand over system-wide access to AI features to third parties, which could compromise user privacy and security.
It makes perfect sense.
Apple's philosophy is that new APIs need some time to stabilize before they can be baked-in as a commitment to third-party developers.
So new APIs are almost always first-party only. Apple designs the API and becomes the first consumer of it. This experience of dogfooding their own APIs lets them iterate and learn without breaking compatibility with third-party developers consuming the API.
Only after an API has been hardened in this way does it become eligible for third-party consumption, where Apple can promise to document and support those APIs publicly.
It makes sense then, that if the DMA mandates equal access to new APIs for third-parties, then Apple will just disable new first-party APIs in the region until they've gotten their bake-in period elsewhere in the world. Sorry, EU!
While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.
They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.
It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.
Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.
These laws only apply to megacorps. It's not an existential risk to them, as Apple is clearly proving now.
Who is saying that enforcing companies to open their systems to competition is making them mediocre? Maybe if that's the end result, they should put more time into designing systems that wouldn't become mediocre just by allowing third parties to do things with those said systems? We need to stop defending corporates for abusing their monopolies.
Megacorps weren't always giants and it's not unusual for small companies to eventually become giants through excellent vertically-integrated products, and such companies would become subject to these regulations.
Interoperability is not free. One of the trades it brings is a notably lowered ceiling in terms of tightness and capabilities, and this persists no matter how many man-hours are poured into engineering the systems that enable it.
The Linux desktop is a great example of this at play. While it's technically worked for decades at this point, it's been a constant struggle to make it a high quality, thoroughly polished experience end to end and that's partly thanks to the unavoidable friction and gaps between layers that comes with interoperability and tens of involved parties.