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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

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bflesch wrote: post #96
Aurornis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Privacy laws are not complex, they only become complex if your goal is to actually skirt them. 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 laws are not complex

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.

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

#112

Post by adrianN »

m3kw9 wrote: post #68
McDyver wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes to show that privacy is not a priority. And it should be.

EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.

I think you should elaborate a bit on that because to me it seems that EU privacy laws are actually fairly good at protecting privacy.

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

#113

Post by flumpcakes »

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.

Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.

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

#114

Post by greggoB »

jplrssn wrote: post #15

> EU regulators on Tuesday slammed Apple This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.

Depends on the news you read I guess, to me the word "slammed" is pretty commonplace in politics news-reporting and has been for a while (read: well before the modern take-down content that's so common to social media platforms).

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

#115

Post by kube-system »

bflesch wrote: post #96
Aurornis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Privacy laws are not complex, they only become complex if your goal is to actually skirt them. 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.

Respectfully, it sounds like you just haven't dealt with any significant tax or regulatory tasks.

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.

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

#116

Post by giancarlostoro »

y1n0 wrote: post #59
giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free. 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.

> Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.

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.

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

#118

Post by mantas »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #66
eykanal wrote: 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…

Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.

In this case it looks like EU is requiring to let competitors mess with Apple users privacy.

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

#119

Post by ErneX »

It would be nice if Europe had companies innovating at this level but it’s not happening. If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies, so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.

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.

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

#120

Post by krzyk »

dktp wrote: post #86
epolanski wrote: post #45

Earlier 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.

That's not fully true. Lots of things get to Europe later (Gemini memories, though we have them now, Spark as latest noteworthy) Or never. Like the majority of Pixel 10 on device AI features (image editing, magic cue).

Some features don't land in Europe because US companies can't handle the amount of languages. For them it is English and maybe Spanish or Chinese because they don't care how heybmake money.
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