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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

#361

Post by doug_durham »

gmueckl wrote: post #35
afavour wrote: 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.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, DMA isn't a privacy regulation. It is simply about competition. You can be in 100% compliance with DMA and poor privacy protections. This is the crux of the problem. How do you preserve the privacy of your customers while complying with regulations where the simplest path is to compromise your customer's privacy?

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

#362

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lxgr wrote: post #300
jefftk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws and strategy are not fixed, and public bickering is part of how they get optimized.

Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick…

> 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

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.

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

#363

Post by wtallis »

inetknght wrote: post #281
dd8601fn wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functionally the EU is requiring that Apple dramatically RELAX their privacy and security postures. 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.

> Functionally the EU is requiring that Apple dramatically RELAX their privacy and security postures. No. Interoperability doesn't require Apple relax their privacy and security postures. It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.

> 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.

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

#364

Post by WarmWash »

Aurornis wrote: post #53
gmueckl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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? 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 situatio…

It's incredible how people are acutely aware how technically inept regulators are (laws affecting their personal use of technology) and how quickly they side with regulators when a law affects how corporations use/create technology.

If regulators suck at understanding tech, they are making poorly thought out laws for corporations just as much as they are for you.

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

#365

Post by troupo »

spullara wrote: post #92
afavour wrote: 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…

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.

"Onerous requirements": users have the right to chose, users have the right to privacy.

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

#366

Post by JumpCrisscross »

inetknght wrote: post #258
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere. Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).

> Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper). 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…

> Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it

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.

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

#367

Post by overfeed »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #207
dylan604 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me

DMA is about competition, not privacy. Apple weren’t requesting a GDPR waiver.

Apple's concern is at the intersection of DMA and privacy. Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of data access that Apple has today would create privacy issues. This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple", but that would be less profitable, but would have prevented the request for an exception because Apple would be on an equal footing with everyone else, if all they could see was client-encrypted data indistinguishable from random bytes.

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

#368

Post by troupo »

GeekyBear wrote: post #344
speedgoose wrote: post #257

I find it interesting that Apple prefers to fall behind in Europe rather than opening their platform a tiny bit. 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.

> rather than opening their platform a tiny bit 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".

Isn't that ultimately the user's choice?

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

#369

Post by flohofwoe »

eykanal wrote: post #38
afavour wrote: 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…

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…

> 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.

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 ;)

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

#370

Post by HappyPanacea »

flaunf221 wrote: post #331
jandrewrogers wrote: post #79

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…

> This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data. 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?"

I have never seen this argument against (admittedly I'm not big into such debates) right to repair, did it came up somewhere?
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