Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
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?
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.
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.
The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.
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
"They really don't try to fuck you over if you engage with them in good faith?"
"Yes, really."
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
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.
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.
If Siri wants to be seen as anything it should first support every EU language and they can work from there.
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.
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...
The endless cookie banners would beg to differ.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
Ironically the gaps you point to are things they have had to do to appease the European Union.
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.
If regulators suck at understanding tech, they are making poorly thought out laws for corporations just as much as they are for you.
Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
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?
Legally, maybe not, practically it becomes their problem.
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.
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 was not the problem for rcs; the carriers are and were.
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.
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.
Couldn’t someone argue that they “knowingly participated“? Do you think they want that risk?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You gotta let people make their own choices.
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.
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.
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.
The code is open source: https://github.com/apple/security-pcc
Technically makes the implementation of other providers harder but in principle it should be possible, no?
Or never. Like the majority of Pixel 10 on device AI features (image editing, magic cue).
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.
https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...
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.
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.
Isn’t this less about privacy than competition?
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.
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.
No. Interoperability doesn't require Apple relax their privacy and security postures. 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.
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?
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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.
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.
The new Siri is limited at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Everyone constantly does!
In the aggregate, I agree, but in tech things are pretty loose outside of California.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe China is easier to work with - perhaps their rules are made clearer?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
I think that's uncharitable. Apple prefers not to have the data either, hence the preference for on-device processing.
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.
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.
This isn’t about privacy. DMA is about interoperability.
Good. Pretty much everything should roll out way slower.
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.
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.
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.
DMA is reasonable. It‘s not their job to be concerned so much as to block that access completely. Alternative approaches do exist. For example, they may require independent audit of submitted apps if they do not trust regulators and collect small fees to cover operational costs of dealing with audit ecosystem.
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.
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.
This looks to me like yet another bet from Apple: "they'll buy iPhones anyway, let them wait".
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.
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 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 guess I don't see how much time they gain unless they don't plan to ever release a DMA compliant version.
It's not that we particularly like the EU government here in the EU. But we do like when they make pro-consumer laws.
Yeah that needs to stop. This is kinda why the DMA was created in the first place...
Yes, they can. Apple wields its duopoly power to try and bend governments to its will.
Then why aren't they?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Besides that, Google has shipped many (not all) similar features to Pixels in the EU and have been for 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.
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, you wouldn't fall under the DMA.
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.
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.
Would you consider supporting US laws?
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".
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.
Citation needed.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
Then you should have done it right the first time.
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.
seems a bit simplistic.
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).
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.
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.
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
Do you never install software on your desktop computer?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
But I agree, that's probably not what OP meant.
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.
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.
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?
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.
= 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.
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.
Where do you get 4th level of deriviation exactly?
And the unelected bureucracy, careerists, and 2-3 big country interests pressuring others under the table, are driving the show...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suggest you verify that.
There is literally nobody you can vote for to if you want to repeal the DMA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
EU voters don't have any saying in any EU level regulation. The EU regime do basically what they want.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: 26% of their net sales comes from Europe for Q1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
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...
> 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.
If the law makes sense, that I cannot judge in this case.
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.
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...
Care to explain? EU is also a jurisdiction, so why would EU law be legal in other areas than EU?
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".
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.
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.
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 could be the legislation on weapons. A less extreme example could be legislation on food additives or PFAS.
QED, Europeans don't tend to disagree with the basic principle of letting people buy things to harm themselves and those around them.
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.
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.
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?
And you’re saying that consumers would be incorrect in thinking that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?"
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/weighing-the-risks-of-righ...
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?
In exchange, it also less secure, less user friendly, and less popular.
Apple has been working for a while to secure MacOS but it’s hard without breaking compatibility with old processes.
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.
The new Siri has much deeper access to personal data and absolutely can not be trusted being siphoned off to a 3rd party server.
Apple thinks users should not be able to make the decision about who can access their data. It is not more complicated that that.
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.
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.
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.
edit: here are some stats https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar
Like this? https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/bmw-ceo-has-blunt-new-m...
The DMA is also threatening Apple's high profit margins. That's the whole point of the DMA.
Or is it actually a crusade against margin?
One thing it isn't for sure: "a crusade".
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?
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.
Problem solved. Next question?
Your turn smart guy: Am I talking about iOS or MacOS?
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?
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.
It seems things start to get rolling in a way that they haven't since the start of the Google/Apple duopoly.
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".
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)
No? You dont!? Why would you "have to"?
From Apple's strategy board point of view, no.
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.
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.
Access Denied
Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed.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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.
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...
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.
>“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.
Because it's not self-defeating, what would that even be FAANG packing up and abandoning Europe? Worked out splendid for China.
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?
They can ship any feature they want, as long as they give users the option to choose alternative implementation of the feature.
"Compliance" isn't a thing without regulation.
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.
Zero idea if its true tho.
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.
Have some dignity. We all deserve the right to fully own our general compute devices.
> 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.
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.
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.
Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
Apple frames this as a privacy issue when it's only a brand/control issue.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
I don't know about every vendor, but Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales.
They’re not going to over a single unproven feature.
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.
Apple must know that they have customers in EU countries..?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://apnews.com/article/apple-iphone-siri-artificial-inte...
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.
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.
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
“European” governments. Non-european governments too.
By definition “not” the EU
So specifically NOT MI6, GCHQ, the Swiss, Norway, FSB.
Only the members of an economic bloc that you envy.
Okay bro
If the price for some sort of functioning Siri is my privacy, I’m happy with the current dumb Siri
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.
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.
Is this supposed to be a good thing when Apple does it? That sounds utterly undesirable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He will bomb Paris and London until Europe capitulates.
Two billion in bigly notes should suffice.
This privilege system already exists. This is just marketing.
Damn, good luck next time. Maybe use some of the $416 billion 2025 revenue to invest into that project?
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.
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 is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Will the EU enforce the same for 3rd party integrations?
If Apple extended that philosophy to other vendors then yeah, it would be deliberately unfair and anticompetitive.
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.
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.
Just have an open house for anyone interested to come poke the hardware and software?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They already claim to care about your freedom and privacy. Now they can prove it.
Seriously EU folks need to come to down to earth sometime.
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.
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.
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.
Mistral. I’d bet my bottom dollar that the French are the reason the EU is holding firm on its position.
Never underestimate the power of a really, really, really irritated counterparty.
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.
At what level? Improve Siri which is lagging behind, then add llms?
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."
I don't think there's a clear good guy/bad guy here.
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.
* 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.
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.
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
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?
Yes. They SHOULD. So how did they do that without throwing away their privacy promise or running afoul of the privacy laws?
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.
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.
This is why the EU is destined to lose and run itself to zero.
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!
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.
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.
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.