Comment by peterspath

> Do you want to give this app unfettered access to all your device data, including other apps' data?

Which Facebook and instagram will present as “tee hee updated terms of service” in the first 15 seconds, and people will tick it, because they’re not interested in reading T&C’s, just want to message their friend about dinner, and aren’t suddenly expected be deceived like that.

> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for. > > The other possibility is that the sky does not fall, and Apple looks both silly and malicious at the same time for ever having suggested that it would, which was clearly in bad faith.

I think the most likely outcome is between these two extremes. My personal data ends up sold to shady companies who use it to target ever more invasive advertising at me in places I wouldn't expect/. Like a boiling frog, I won't really notice the difference and my life will gradually become a little shittier.

> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.

I'd prefer they focus on safeguarding my data instead of playing a ridiculous game of brinksmanship with regulators to make a point.

> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.

I don't think that is what will happen. People, and the media, will blame Apple: it is them after all giving that data over because they hold it. No that doesn't make logical sense, but that has never mattered before why would it matter now.

Once Apple loses that trust re. data privacy, its gone forever. I get why they're being particular about it.

I don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parity. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For Apple it means building all the APIs that probably already exist but this time to be requested by apps, which would be a huge attack surface, even Apple's own apps suffers from security breaches (like Message before the switch to closed container execution). AI breaks the separation of concerns, which can lead to disastrous consequences.

EU has great intentions, and of course, feature parity should be offered so that competition can exist, but I don't find it crazy that it is more complicated on a product like that. As tech people things are very obvious to us but we need to remember that we are talking about a product used by everyone.

As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.

I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.

> Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.

I think we have ample evidence that regardless of whether Apple in particular is to be trusted, tech companies by default are certainly not.

Opening up access to users’ private data requires not just any given app to be trustworthy, but all of them.

I don't think they trust Gemini as they run that on-device or on-site, on Apple's own servers.

See also https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

I think there’s a case that Apple’s commitment to privacy here will increase participation by 3rd party developers.

For example, if I’m maintaining a secure chat app, I think I’d be more likely to adopt the APIs to share the chat messages with the system AI due to Apple’s promises that the data will either be processed On Device, or in their Private Compute Cloud.

If I instead believe that sharing the chat messages with the system AI would cause those messages to be sent to unknown-to-me other entities, I think I’d be less likely to participate in the new API.

This user might be okay with their data going to this other provider, but what about the people they’re messaging? I have a responsibility and a commitment to _all_ of my users to protect their data.

I might not be able to control what any specific user does with the data, but proactively writing the code that sends the chat messages to this other system is something that I have control over.

And that's exactly how it works for apps you download from the App Store. Apple even makes app publishers declare data collection and privacy practices on the App Store before you install apps.

It's clearly just Apple not wanting to further open up their platform to competition.

Meta would probably start a massive ad campain to pay people money to install Meta iPhone AI.

The are not a "gatekeeper" under DMA (not enough users). Same as macOS.

> But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems?

Simply because they are too small in user count. EU DMA, DSA etc. only apply at certain thresholds. Twitter for example falls under the scope, but Tesla is a distinct entity from Twitter and even if they were merged together, they would still be distinct services in the eye of the law.

Because Tesla hasn't been classified as a gate-keeper in the DMA.

Tesla is not marked as a gatekeeper by the EU and thus the law does not apply.

> Or that they wouldn't let you set default maps app outside of the EU

They were mandated to create a scheme in isolation on a deadline, without having input either from navigation apps or from consumers, and without any requirement that web browsers or other operating systems would need to support the same scheme.

As another comment pointed out - it doesn't work. Websites and apps still integrate with a navigation product directly, rather than use this scheme. And why wouldn't they? Even if it was launched worldwide on iOS, it still is just a defined subset of any particular navigation product functionality. It also is just yet another navigation option to integrate into your platform, since the feature still wouldn't be available on desktops/Android.

Until everyone is sitting at the table wanting to work towards interoperability, the feature simply can't work. So why perpetuate a broken chooser into other markets?

This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.

It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.

I believe Google provides the weights, compute is apple owned