This doesn't have anything to do with privacy.

The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.

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bnj 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But that does have to do with privacy.

Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.

So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.

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alt227 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Thats what Apple wants you to think. In reality it has nothing to do with privacy. Apple could let 3rd parties tap into these APIs but only after the user clicks away a big scary message telling the user they are leaving the comfort of the apple curated garden.

This allows competition, but also allows privacy for those who want it. See? Simple really, but Apple being Apple dont want to let 3rd parties use its AI APIs and so we have this standoff.

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FinnKuhn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is using Cloud compute as well to enable Siri AI.

If you want to you could still use Apple or another provider you decide to trust - or even one that does everything locally. The competition would still have to follow GDPR after all.

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theshrike79 an hour ago | parent [-]

Apple PCC has been independently audited to be ultra secure.

Will the EU enforce the same for 3rd party integrations?

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FinnKuhn an hour ago | parent [-]

If Apple had e.g. required competitors to undergo similar independent audits that would probably be allowed as it is quite similar to how Apple solved the third party app store issue.

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MBCook an hour ago | parent [-]

Are we sure the EU would allow that? Or would it be seen as a way to stifle competition?

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean, Apple's PCC audits require them to individually vet each auditor before they're allowed to see the PCC nodes.

If Apple extended that philosophy to other vendors then yeah, it would be deliberately unfair and anticompetitive.

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MBCook 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

It sounds like they are whitelisting the hashes of all the Google software and OSes and stuff to ensure nothing is changed out from under them without them knowing.

Even if you could make all the other possible vendors run private cloud compute style stuff that would be a lot to manage.

And I can’t imagine the EU would like, and as a user I would certainly hate, the “OK you can use Grok but you lose all privacy too bad“ dialogue box they could make.

	▲	bigyabai 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't even think it offers a meaningful degree of security. It's a form of theater, you have to be hand-selected to perform the audit that Apple promised. Most sysadmins know that hash matching only mitigates a small subset of rare upstream attacks. Apple could still be MITMing the whole thing (SSL added and removed here :)) and no auditor would get the chance to check. The offered audit is so weak that I would not trust any FAANG business to administrate it. Apple is once again demanding arbitrary centralization to give them an undeserved veto power. None of this is for security.

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flopbob 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is mostly wrong. The DMA has a process to determine if a service provider acts a gatekeeper to the market, and let's be honest if Apple is not one, then I don't know who else besides Google.. So there is no privacy argument in there except Apple didn't want to design a interface that complies and is safe.

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crimsontech 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Siri AI has the capability to read your screen and access a lot of personal stuff. I don't blame Apple for not wanting to open this up to allow any model to access it. It seems Apple proposed a number of solutions which were denied.

While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.

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matchbok3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones. Nothing about this is about choice or the free market. They want special treatment.

Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).

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FinnKuhn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 available to third party apps. I think there are plenty of other examples to demonstrate the point.

A free market doesn't work if you have a duopoly. A free market requires the freedom to choose between different services, which Apple is trying to limit by only allowing Siri AI to access specific OS interfaces.

Not sure why some people on hackernews support more locked down operating system.

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matchbok3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are hundreds of phone models. A smartphone is a just one type.

Apple came out of nowhere and invented the smartphone because the existing system was controlled by the telcos and horrible phone technology. The same thing can easily happen again.

It makes no sense to limit Netflix on phones and people would probably stop buying iPhones.

If the EU wants an "open" phone ecosystem, they should foster real innovation in their space and build it themselves.

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slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 cares.

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FinnKuhn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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/

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slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, they would be gatekeepers if it wasn't possible to get a phone which didn't run their operating systems. You can, it's just that they suck and nobody wants it. You have cause and effect backwards.

If you have a market with a handful of companies producing good products, and a handful of companies producing shit products nobody wants or buys, you cannot claim that the companies producing the good products are "gatekeeping", and that's the reason why nobody buys the shit products.

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FinnKuhn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Them making the only phones anyone uses makes them the gatekeepers on what people do on their phones -> Apple and Google are gatekeepers under the DMA.

It doesn't matter how they became gatekeepers.

	▲	slopinthebag an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If people cared they would use something else. People don't care. That doesn't make them gatekeepers.

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f6v 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The EU is going to be China minus the technology.