Why is there so much talk about privacy here? The DMA is an antitrust framework,the privacy argument is just the Apple spin of their refusal to comply
Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
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Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#122Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to…
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years. Su…
The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering. I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.
> If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration. The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bicker…
I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#124Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones? Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late. Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.
Appples architecture prevents them from seeing customers data (see Private Cloud Compute documentation). Data that Gemini Assistant (not referring to the distilled version Apple uses) see goes straight to Google. Big difference here. Weird to say it but the only assistant with any guarantee for privacy by design is Siri at the moment.
> Data that Gemini see goes straight to Google.
That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.
I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.
And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#126Apple is right, EU wants to live in the stone age because of these laws, let them.
Right, wanting operability, alternative default apps, equal access to APIs is "wanting to live in the stone age". POSIX is the stone age model, and Microsoft is the future.
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes…
In this case it looks much simpler: Apple strictly does not want to open up the iOS platform to other competing agents, as they lose the monopolistic moat if they do. While making a true developer platform with good documentation is often hard and expensive, with the market access they'd get, companies would gladly jump on it even if it was badly documented as long as they have guarantees of continued legal access. A…
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Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones. Do you really? The only two types of operating systems for phones that you could reasonably use are iOS and Android. So it's either Apple or Google. Imagine a world, in which you could only consume Apple or Google services on those phones. No more Netflix or Disney+ on iPhones - only Apple TV Plus because the streaming video API is not availabl…
There are phones running alternative versions of Android with no google dependency, and there are phones running linux. Furthermore, if we lived in a world where the two main OS's were locked down to an insane degree, we would also have plenty of alternative operating systems. The reason we don't today is because we don't really have a need for it, in the same way linux has a monopoly on servers and nobody really car…
> There are phones running alternative versions of Android with no google dependency, and there are phones running linux.
Those make up 0% of the market [1], which classifies Apple and Google as gatekeepers.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe/
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exemption Apple wanted was not from a privacy law, but from the DMA. They never claimed to have an issue meeting their privacy laws when using their own product, it was other people's products that they said they couldn't guarantee the privacy of. Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
You mean they wanted there to be no confusion whatsoever that they wouldn't allow competition in their ecosystem.
The exemption requested was temporary.
Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years. Su…
Why does systems are not designed take into account that compliance work?
Because of move fast and break things mentality. Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights, they would have reached nowhere.