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EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

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Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#631

Post by katbyte »

dingleberry420 wrote: post #532
martimarkov wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that users can be tricked to do it. Used to happen to my parents all the time on Android. They'd install random apps and the website will "guide" them how to install this app by going to settings and enabling "untrusted developers". This is my issue with all these devs screaming at apple. Your customers chose a product for whatever reason. Don't like it? I don't care - respect their choices. It sp…

What happened to personal agency? Let people make mistakes, you don't need to infantilize them.

young children don't know any better. hell many teens don't. older people get dementia and go senile. Not everyone is tech savvy.

And selfishly I don't want to have to continually be on guard with my phone and worry about "making mistakes". Don't go forcing your world view on a product i have selected in large part because of the restrictions it places on developers, especially when you have the larger android ecosystem giving you it.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#632

Post by Barrin92 »

nicce wrote: post #583
Barrin92 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then don't install third party apps on your iPhone and only install Apple software? Like I literally cannot understand the thought process behind this. Someone needs to physically restrain you from installing an app that you don't want? Nobody is forcing you to do anything, other people just get more options. People here on HN support this because people here like software freedom instead of being treated like infant…

> then don't install third party apps on your iPhone and only install Apple software? Like I literally cannot understand the thought process behind this. Someone needs to physically restrain you from installing an app that you don't want? Because not everyone understands tech very well. There will be tons of social engineering campaigns to make you install the app you don’t want. And enough of them will succeed. And…

People have been using laptops and desktops (including from apple), on which they can run their own software, for literally decades. Closed systems are new, not open ones. My 60 year old boomer father who has 9 years of education can find his way around on the command line. Yes, people don't understand tech very well any more because we're giving them crippled tech, and treat them as if they are helpless. It's the paternalism that makes people illiterate, not the other way around.

It's such a belittling attitude. Only the chosen HN users and managers in Cupertino with their high IQs can control their devices, everyone else must be handed toys lest they might do something wrong. Replace user with voter in your post and you have the bog standard authoritarian argument for banning half of all newspapers.

And as for privacy, the EU has the strongest privacy protections on the globe for a reason. We passed privacy regulation so we don't need to rely on Apple to run a sort of protection racket.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#633

Post by greedo »

saiya-jin wrote: post #539
colinmhayes wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what people are saying though. Whether or not apple cares about its users is completely irrelevant. The question is whether apples incentives align with its users better than other tech companies. The answer pretty clearly seems to be yes, apple makes most of its money by selling hardware, their incentive is to make a product people enjoy. Competitors make most of their money selling ads, their incentive i…

> their incentive is to lock users All good apart from this. Apple does this magnificently, ie closed hardware protocols. For example there are significantly better earphones than airpads pro (and some cost +-same), but good luck getting same level of integration over apple's proprietary protocols. While rest of whole universe at least tries to adhere to open things so we users have freedom in how we design & evolve…

Umm, Thunderbolt was developed by Intel, in cooperation with Apple. And IIRC, Apple is a member of the USB consortium. Too bad design by committee sucks and has led to the disaster that is USB-C.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#634

Post by novok »

itsoktocry wrote: post #585
shuckles wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ad system? Their programmatic ad inventory does not support tracking, as anyone who has access to developer ads can confirm.

Forgive my ignorance, but how do we know that Apple doesn't track more data than they provide to developers?

If you ever interview apple developers for other companies, or just inspect what is being sent to apple's servers constantly from their devices, you'll realize that apple is recording A LOT of very private info about their users.

Apple is very much a 'private from everyone but apple' company, they smartly just don't talk about it out loud. For their high level apps like TV and such, have things like privacy review. But their security, activation and map parts do record a lot of info.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#635

Post by car_analogy »

aljungberg wrote: post #601
dingleberry420 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to personal agency? Let people make mistakes, you don't need to infantilize them.

So many people in this thread seem to be arguing I should not be allowed to choose Apple’s model as it is today, “for my own good”. The article is about explicitly outlawing parts of their model. How’s that for personal agency and not infantilising me?

> “for my own good”

No, for the common good. We are all harmed when Apple or Google can decide which businesses will succeed or fail, which apps get censored and which are allowed.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#637

Post by ceeplusplus »

username_my1 wrote: post #552
ceeplusplus wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't eat into any revenues. In the Netherlands Apple charges 27% commission on any revenues paid into external payment systems [1]. And what is the EU exactly going to do - ban Apple from charging for access to their software APIs [2]? That seems like one step from banning charging for software as a whole. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/4/22917582/apple-netherlands... [2] Yes, APIs themselves are not copyrig…

Lol shit loads of psps have super simple native SDKs: PayPal, stripe, adyen…. They’re all waiting for the day developers switch to their apis. And developers usually work with them over the web, they just didn’t do so on ios because of apple policy

I don't mean payment providers, I mean Apple device APIs like HealthKit, WeatherKit, SwiftUI, CoreML, ARKit, etc. Nobody is stripping all that out (there aren't even real competitors for a lot of these things).

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#638

Post by xdennis »

anothernewdude wrote: post #612

So much legislation in the EU. No wonder they never get any small firms there. What start-up is going to navigate all this bullshit while actually developing anything worthwhile?

This allows more companies to compete with Apple on their platform.

Let's say you want to start a payments company. You can do that now. This gives consumers and small firms more freedom.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#639

Post by MBCook »

xdennis wrote: post #636
MBCook wrote: post #216

And Chrome now owns the web. Goodbye open web. It was a fun 30 years. Way to go EU.

The EU went after IE when it owned the web. They can go after Google if it keeps abusing its search monopoly to push Chrome.

I’m seriously worried it won’t happen fast enough. I don’t like the “if this blows up we’ll fix it later” school of things. I’d much prefer to be prepared for the obvious possibility ahead of time and it never blow up.

Honestly there’s a case for going after Android itself, it killed the market for phones OSes since why develop/charge for one when you can get it for free. MS had no way to compete with free.

But how could you ever undo that at this point?

(Exception is Apple who was already established and does everything on their own anyway and the cash to fund it)

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#640

Post by xdennis »

anonymousab wrote: post #16
guerrilla wrote: post #10

Oh wow, that's quite a list. I wonder if any of it will end up having retroactive effects because > Ensure that all apps are uninstallable. I REALLY want to remove some of this junk Samsung forced on my phone (while omitting screen record on this model.)

I suspect the compliance will be as minimal as possible, e.g. uninstalling included junk will only flip some settings bit that hides some of the user facing activity. Just enough to make a glib "look, we obeyed the law" statement as they will assume nobody will actually take them to court over it. Perhaps I am too pessimistic.

Or worse, bundle things together. So if you want to remove some junk it also removes essential things like being able to call somebody.
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