Apple says UK could 'veto' global privacy tools | Hacker News Reader

Apple says UK could 'veto' global privacy tools

bbc.co.uk

38 pointsmindracer41 comments

Other countries would bid for the same veto, and go to great lengths if necessary to obtain “equality” in this respect to UK. Countries would then all veto security improvements they could exploit on one-another. If country A knows country B would benefit from a patch going out, country A could veto, leading to an overall worse experience and destruction of quality, trust, and value in Apple in the long run. The pedophile argument is so worn when UK is toothless in holding its own Prince Andrew’s behavior to account.

Overall, Home Office is gaming to destroy value in Apple. The legislation is an existential threat to the company’s long term health. If there were technical people at Home Office who knew better on security than the engineers at Apple, they would already be working at Apple since Apple pays better. Even a person most “duty bound to service” has to pay rent or a mortgage, so the most highly-skilled people in security are already working at firms like Apple, and not for Home Office where they presume to veto privacy for the world.

It’ll never happen, but how wonderful would it be for a major international company to simply withdraw from a country that manages to push through crazy rules?

This already happened to Russia.

While many companies did try to get a PR bump from it, most companies pulled out due to government imposed economic sanctions on Russia, not because they had an ethical or moral drive to punish Russia for their actions

The government then seized all the McDonald's and reopened them. Apparently the food quality got slightly better too.

I’m waiting for that day with anguish, the nation state has run its curse. All hail our corporate overlords. I would take a Amazon citizenship, if push come to shelve I could probably live in a wholefood community garden.

Probably feasible. When the UK was part of the EU, it was probably too big of a market to leave. Now that they're out on their own, it's less difficult.

It’s not just giving up the revenue, it’s also moving the engineering.

How many engineers, product designers etc does Apple employ in the UK? I have no idea.

I’d argue the latter would indeed be a challenge for Apple, but also a significant part of the threat toward a country

The UK is not a big enough market to credibly threaten this sort of veto. Easy enough to exclude them and continue to serve the rest of the world. The UK will fold well before Apple would need to.

If recent history is any guide, the UK will fold by next Monday, have a cabinet reshuffle 2 days later following a MP revolt, a leadership contest in a month, and a wilting turnip as a PM after that.

It's true that some Tories want Rishi to go, but the problem is they have no credible replacement. They already had to dredge a Lord from the upper chamber back for a Great Office of State, which is legal but completely contemptuous. Like, sure, get a Lord to be Minister for Steam Engines or something, but Foreign Secretary? You are having a laugh.

Imagine you're charged with putting forward two names to the Tory members. Remember if you put one serious answer and one joke, the addled members might pick the joke, which is why we got Truss, so don't do that. You need two people who want the job. Aside from Rishi, who has the job now, who do you think even wants this job ?

> They already had to dredge a Lord from the upper chamber back for a Great Office of State, which is legal but completely contemptuous.

It’s worse than that. They had to put him there first in order to dredge him from it. I love how the UK is a fascinating mixture of modernism and traditions, but this fits right in the return to the 19th century theme some Conservatives seem to want.

> Like, sure, get a Lord to be Minister for Steam Engines or something, but Foreign Secretary? You are having a laugh.

Indeed. And steam engines are very relevant because this kind of fudge is completely anachronistic.

> Aside from Rishi, who has the job now, who do you think even wants this job ?

You could take the Mogg out of his coffin, I suppose. I am not sure he’d have many supporters but he would probably be flattered.

Boris would do anything for a blowjob or if it could help him avoid doing something a bit difficult.

I am not sure Truss got the message, from what I have heard of her post-PM speeches.

There are plenty of faceless xenophobic ex-ERG types who seem to be convinced they are the only true patriots. I can imagine one of them getting delusions of grandeur and overestimating their popularity.

Truth be told, it’s become difficult to imagine how low the Conservatives would go in a leadership contest. And as long as they are the ones deciding who gets a shot at beating Truss, anything goes. Hopefully things will become more sensible after a general election, but at this point I will need to see it to believe it.

it's weird to me that you're taking for Apple here. the issue is more that big corps are able to impose their will into countries than the reverse

It is a give and take; governments can give requirements to do business but can't mandate business is done.

In general, I advocate for the people to have freedom against any negative and controlling centralized power. Government and corporates both.

Depends on the size of the market, of course. Apple is trying to tell the British public to correct their laws so they don't need to make difficult decisions, or even worse, spend money customising their software for the UK market.

Apple doesn't have a problem with following the Chinese laws and have set up an entirely separate network for their iCloud backups. Of course they'll make more in China yhan they'll make in the UK, but its clear that Apple is willing to comply with the law if a large enough part of their bottom line is at stake.

It is a problem, because companies cannot truly be multinational. When a Chinese Citizen is executed for political dissent as a direct result of American CEOs rolling over to get markets share in a hostile hellhole They should be put on trial like the French concrete firm who was dealing with ISIS

"Why are you booing him, he's right?" https://youtu.be/75GaqVWqEXU

Multinational companies exist insofar as we can agree politically. When we prioritize the economy, we create insane double-standards that encourage corrupt lawmaking and endless lobbying. If we don't take these problems seriously at-home, nobody does, and then we get Foxconn suicide nets and nightmarish international dependencies.

That's a weird way to do lobbying. Our politicians are cheap by American standards!

Google divested from China after China put in some crazy rules like "we can and will hack you with impunity"

I hope no one is shocked by this. The weaponization of regulations against free citizens is only going to ramp up.

It's not like the corporations were well-poised to offer us privacy in the first place. Apple complies with thousands of warrantless requests for data every year, them being mad at government surveillance only makes sense as a marketing scheme.

When the government tells them to lie, they lie: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

Well, the good thing about corporations is that they only care about money. Governments usually try to justify their existence with some ideology, be it religion, fascism, "human rights", or "fighting the climate change". Sorry, but given a choice between a mafia and a cult I will always choose mafia, they are more reasonable, therefore easier to deal with.

Twitter's self-destructive spiral under Musk is clearly a case of a corporation putting ideology above money in the worst possible way.

I think Twitter is 10000000000000000000x better under Musk...

If you think your government is a cult, then move. Unless you live in an actual cult, nobody will stop you from leaving.

Is it illegal in the UK for two or more people to communicate in such a way as for the communication to be not understood or recorded by an external party?

If not, how is it illegal to facilitate that communication?

(I guess: because authoritarian politicians can make up nonsensical authoritarian legislation)

I prefer legislation to be sensical, but I guess this is the timeline.

Time for Apple, Google, and Meta to take a stand against this madness by threatening to withdraw their services from the UK. If the UK government manages to get its way then there will be a long queue of other nations looking to bring in similar laws. Security and privacy on the net would then become lowest common denominator, criminality would be unimpeded, and internet-based economic activity would be massively impacted by lack of trust.

Disclosure: I'm British and I can state with confidence that my present government are delusional idiots

On the one hand, I hate my (the UK) government and using laws like this to spy on people is totally their modus operandi.

On the other hand, I don't think for a second Apple have pure and benevolent intentions here (or anywhere, for that matter)

Damn. The UK really likes to copy Russia.

A5/1 all over again.

I'd be more okay with HN's "poor weak countries and their regulations are the only things standing in the way of mighty Apple" contingent if it weren't for incredibly predictable things like this.

Except for the UK is neither poor or weak.

Its poorer and weaker than it was. widespread inequality, almost fifteen years of domestic austerity, brexit, widespread regulatory capture, privatisations and crumbling infrastructure, huge reductions in state capability (especially military), delusional nostalgic nationalist politics, three decades of getting involved in disastrous and/or illegal wars.

Disclosure: brit

Plus the biggest two things: war in Europe and post-Covid fallout.

This sounds a lot like the US as well. I lived in London and Surrey County as a kid. Since brexit I ask my friends so you decided to Londonize your whole country as that seems like the only viable path forward. I use a lot of British software, Nuke, Affinity, HDR Light Studio and I can see more of it develop. That said has to be painful to deal the austerity (which is wild as the UK still runs a deficit).

There is no good guy. I trust Apple as far as their interests align with mine. I trust my country as far as I have a say in its politics. Of course there are many companies just as powerful as Apple whose interests have nothing or almost nothing in common with mine, and my country has a lot of people voting for stupid people. And I have zero confidence in the UK collectively to do anything sensible at this point.

All this to say, sometimes I think Apple is on the good side, and sometimes not. That’s normal, the world is not black and white.

Like Apple's measures to prevent tracking people from apps out across the internet, because they value privacy and don't want their users to be tracked.

Unless you want to take payments via an external link to a webpage, in which case you are now required by Apple to track users of your website so that you can pay them 27% of any purchases someone makes for a week after clicking that link.

You know, the same thing Facebook and other advertisers were doing. Which was bad. But now that Apple is the one making money off of it, actually it's fine.

> Like Apple's measures to prevent tracking people from apps out across the internet, because they value privacy and don't want their users to be tracked.

You misunderstand or misrepresent their policy. Tracking across apps is exactly that. It’s designed to limit data harvesters, 3rd-party analytics libraries that build individuals’ profiles by following them across several unrelated apps.

This is entirely unrelated to a company linking accounts between their apps and their website, which is entirely uncontroversial and has been for as long as there have been apps on iPhones. I mean, how else is a Gmail app supposed to be consistent with the website?

It’s been the same thing since forever with the Amazon and Netflix apps, as well.

> You know, the same thing Facebook and other advertisers were doing. Which was bad. But now that Apple is the one making money off of it, actually it's fine.

Facebook is harvesting data across apps and websites indiscriminately and without the subjects’ consent. It’s completely disingenuous to say that this is equivalent to Spotify knowing what the users do in their app and in their website.

If I don’t have a Spotify account, Spotify does not know a thing about me. That is not the case for Facebook.

> This is entirely unrelated to a company linking accounts between their apps and their website, which is entirely uncontroversial and has been for as long as there have been apps on iPhones. I mean, how else is a Gmail app supposed to be consistent with the website?

The policy applies whether or not your app uses accounts. Software licensing can be as simple as "you pay us, we email you a link which will launch the app and apply your license key." But not if you're using this new special linking flow.

If someone clicks the purchase button in your app to go to your website, decides not to purchase it, then 6 days later they navigate back to your website from Google or a link that a friend sent them and they decide to buy it that time, Apple will expect you to have tracked that they used the in-app link a week ago so that you can pay them. You might prefer not to track customers browsing your website (for example, you might avoid using cookies so that you aren't required to plaster a cookie consent banner on every page) but Apple says too bad.

How will Apple enforce this? I have no idea. But to get permission to use external purchase links you have to agree to pay Apple 27% on purchases with 7 days of clicking it and give Apple permission to audit your accounting of those purchases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com