"Siri AI will not be available in E.U. until we figure out privacy"
Funny to hear that after they mentioned how seriously they are taking privacy every 37 seconds.
Funny to hear that after they mentioned how seriously they are taking privacy every 37 seconds.
Under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
App developers can already access the on-device foundational models through an API, but I don't think many developers want to do that because there are better models.
We have all kinds of data access controls, these could probably also be built around Siri and competitors.
Is that accurate?
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
I know there are alternative phones that are more open, and I recognize that the level of ease and comfort I get from a big name phone requires some of those trade-offs. Linux was my desktop of choice and probably would be again if my employer allowed it, but I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the tiny sharp edges of Linux on a mobile device.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"
Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.
As far as the backup software, the analogy doesn’t hold for me: there’s an expectation that it will have access to your hard disk. There’s also an expectation that you can disconnect your internet and still back up your hard disk - can’t exfiltrate data if you’re offline.
The "privacy" angle here is that Apple wants to give Siri access to user data across the system, without offering any way for competitors to get at that data.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
This is due to EU's wider tech regulation "DMA"
And, in fact, it's due to DMA's mandate leaning _against_ privacy:
> under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
How can Apple guarantee privacy then?