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Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

reuters.com

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Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#151
post #110

What does it even mean to "roll out in EU"? These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny.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.

It's referring to legal jurisdiction, not anyone's personal relationship with nationality or residence.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#152
post #2

Apple 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…

Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.

Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous. 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 A…

I am perfectly ok with EU having different rules of their own but they also can't be upset when features aren't offered there. That is the trade-off they have chosen and I am ok with it.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#154
post #38

Earlier 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…

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.

Are you sure about that?

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#155
post #35
post #2

Apple 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…

Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily. 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.

Apple is providing a level of privacy far beyond what the laws require. It would be easy if they only wanted to comply with GDPR and DMA.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#156
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years. 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.

The new Siri isn't available in China yet either.

Or really anywhere, since it comes out in Fall. Unless you count developer betas as available of course.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#157
post #38

Earlier 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…

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.

> 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

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.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#158

So, first they have to be regulated because Apple and Android form a duopoly. Then they want to get an exception that the other duopoly player does not get. 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,…

EU wants people to be able to plug any model into the new Siri system that will have unlimited 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.

Very different than the narrative you're pushing

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#159

There is a widespread expectation here in the EU that every vendor in the world wants to access the common market and thus will accept any regulations and limitations that come with it. 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…

> Europe accounted for nearly 27% of Apple's total sales in its last fiscal year

I don't know about every vendor, but Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales.

Re: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

#160
post #141

I understand Apple's position on this one. This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data. It is also a very useful feature. The EU regulators are disallowing guardrails without which this backdoor will be used to strip-mine people's personal data. The privacy implications are not legible to most people. If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the enc…

It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor. 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…

The technical problem is nothing like exchanging data with fitness trackers.

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.

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