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 19 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 44 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 37 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.