a document likely means an email. this sort of request will be something like "send us a copy of every piece of communication from the last 10 years that you have which contain "epic", "revenue split", "monopoly", or "shut out competitors". from there the documents will be reviewed by some combination of AI and unlucky law school students on an internship to see whether Apple is doing things they shouldn't.
It’s self incrimination, but that’s not the main point. It shows we’re trying to guess what the moral person was thinking while doing the crime. Is this ok in the justice theory?
Many crimes do indeed hinge on the mental state of the person doing the deed. The alternative is absolute liability, where e.g. you could be guilty of purchasing stolen goods even if you thought they were legitimate; even if you specifically asked and told the goods weren't stolen.
(In the US) Self incrimination is only protected in criminal contexts. In civil cases, you can be compelled to do, or say things that harm your own case, because in civil matters you are not being incriminated by definition.
this isn't quite true. you can't be compelled in a civil case to provide evidence of you committing a crime. it's just that doing so will be really bad in the civil case since it allows the court to draw an "adverse inference" that whatever you aren't disclosing probably really sucks for your case.
As an American, I can't help but feel like they just shrug off all these cases and do the minimum required by the EU, kinda sorta, while still screwing over the rest of the world (like with the app store and browser renderer). Wish the US had real consumer protections like Europe did.
And yet whenever the EU is brought up around here its "draconian" regulations are blamed for stagnating tech innovation. At least there are governments that try to protect their citizens from the habitual privacy and rights violations by Big Tech.
I made a remark over on Reddit some time ago about how I'd prefer to live in the EU because I'd prefer the quality of life there over a bigger number on my paycheck (that mostly goes to rent anyway)
People were borderline out for blood on such a defiant worldview
Yeah, people go ballistic when I mention costs from rural northern Germany. Average software developer salary is 5000€ net per month. Renting a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is about 1000€ per month. If both adults work, that means the family home is about 10% of the income. 20 minutes by car/bus to the next city center, though.
> Average software developer salary is 5000€ net per month
Huh? That is far above the average developer salary. Even in a big city this would only be plausible in a highly demanded specialty and high experience level. Far from average.
Sounds like an outlier to me, unless you can provide some statistics.
All good jobs are limited and you'll need a certain amount of skill and competitiveness to get them.
But remote work in software development is pretty widely accepted in Germany, too.
That said, especially in the countryside, there are a lot of companies actually building or producing stuff. And they need IT services, too. Any food batch that's not properly accounted for in your warehousing software is effectively unsellable and, thus, a pure loss.
Actually they are. It was ruled that if you can accept all in one click, you must be able to reject all in one equally easy, equally prominent click, or you're violating the law.
Ha nice! They should start to enforce then, because what you get is "accept" and "configure", and if you select the latter here starts the click galore.
While the GDPR was le grand coup, it’s sad they can’t revert mistakes. Which begs the question: Why doesn’t every site put the EU flag as a background of the cookie banner, until the EU reckons?
No one forced site owners to suck out personal information from customers to sell them to the highest bidder. A normal, human respecting website doesn't even need a consent banner.
I wish there were browser apis for cookie prefs already. Just set it at the browser and all sites just use that setting. But of course Google can't do that since they want people to be bombarded by cookie banners and agitate for an end to GDPR
Can you just communicate like a normal person instead of a redditer trying to win an argument? There's a growing body of snarky responses that are not literally denigrating, but tacitly assume you're such an idiot that you have to be reminded of things like "objects exist after they leave your sight". It wears me down. I'm tired of it.
Except they do make a good point here. As much as I understand and share the sentiment 'imiric expressed, the comment is sloppy with its implications, and GP is right to point out that the regulation can have both good and bad effects, be praised for the former and criticized for latter, all at the same time, without any one being incorrect.
Unfortunately, normal people do have to be reminded of the basics, because they seem statistically unable to process nuance in any argument they already have an opinion on. The whole idea of winning an argument is a kind of weird normie thing, a sportsball game with words, which is fine as entertainment, but problematic when it gets confused for reasoning about things.
> The whole idea of winning an argument is a kind of weird normie thing, a sportsball game with words, which is fine as entertainment, but problematic when it gets confused for reasoning about things.
Arguments as soldiers. Win at any cost, doesn't matter if what's said now contradicts what came before.
I didn't know about the idea until someone else explained it to me; talking about it with my much older brother, he had noticed it spontaneously.
It was a neutral statement. If you read it (ha!) in "reddit snarky style" that's on you. Maybe reduce your reddit time?
Maybe it would be time for you to reflect on how much you implied in that simple sentence. None of what you said I implied or desired to do. It was simply my comment and opinion and contribution to the comment.
It was not a substantive contribution. Hacker News guidelines [1] discourage sneers, shallow dismissals, and non-substantive snark, swipes, and cross examination.
I can’t stand this either, also “source?” thrown into the middle of discussions for information that’s broadly known or available within the context of what’s being discussed. This often just demonstrates the person arguing with you isn’t well read on the topic.
"Broadly known" information in such discussions is typically just everyone sharing the same hearsays they picked up over the years, without ever verifying any one of it themselves. If one finds a request for source annoying, it suggests the claim is actually one of those - broadly-known true and accurate information has plenty of definitive sources to back it up.
There's lots of dumb things "people in general" believe. The infamous list on Wikipedia[0] is just the tip of an iceberg. Everyone is vulnerable to this; if you aren't occasionally discovering and correcting such dumb "broadly known" things in your own beliefs, you aren't paying attention.
I mostly agree with your comment so I don't think we're talking about the same thing exactly. I'm refering to true and accurate information that should be the baseline requirement for entering a discussion or argument being requested and find that annoying.
It is a fact that companies like Apple, Meta etc are not bringing AI technology to the EU specifically because the regulations are not clear of their obligations.
And if they don't comply it is a ridiculous and unprecedented fine of 10% of global revenue.
I disagree. To me it looks like Apple is trying to put the EU into bad light. They have already said they’ll bring AI to European countries in 2025 but for the whole summer the news was “the EU won’t let Apple bring AI to the masses.” Even my mother told me about it.
They are a trillion dollar company, it’s not like they don’t know what is and isn’t allowed by the law.
How can they safely bring it when they don’t know what regulation they precisely will have to deal with? It seems like instead of both sides pointing fingers they could have talks in earnest on what are the requirements for AI on personal devices in the EU. Some decision can’t be simply “we’ll know it when we see it” by the authorities
OpenAI did it so I don’t see why Apple couldn’t. They process data on the device and already have the Siri precedent, which receives, stores and analyzes data from every invocation. I don’t think there’s anything inherently new and unknown as far as data is concerned.
> specifically because the regulations are not clear of their obligations.
"unclear obligations":
- do not use people's data without their consent
- disclose and document your training data
Of course it's "unclear" to companies like Facebook who opted everyone on their platform in to training their AI models by default.
Apple's "AI" is coming to all users everywhere eventually. As many of their products it's rolled out to US, English-speaking, rest of the world, in that order. And it won't even fully ship to the US until sometime next year. Their "boohoo EU" is marketing and PR bullshit aimed at gullible morons.
> And if they don't comply it is a ridiculous and unprecedented fine of 10% of global revenue.
It's a fine up to 10% of global revenue. And that number can only be reached when the company willingly and willfully continues to break the law
This is the problem with the DMA and AI acts. The specifics are not written into law. Everything is left up to the EU Commissioner to decide as each case presents itself. Which makes it impossible for companies to predict what their decisions will be. And why would they take the risk with such massive fines on the table.
This kind of regulatory uncertainty is toxic to business.
Also Apple didn't just not release Apple Intelligence in the EU. They've geo-blocked it so you specifically can't use it even in English. They would only do this for legal reasons.
- people would complain about government overreach and that government dictates technological solutions
- no laws would ever be written because there are so many aspects to consider, and it's impossible to predict the future
Facebook, for instance, could easily start with complying with the two bullet points I posted. They don't, and they fight the EU in courts claiming they have god-given right to user data.
And yet you pretend that these companies are somehow victims. They are not.
> Which makes it impossible for companies to predict what their decisions will be.
This is PR and marketing bullshit. EU Commission literally talks to all the involved and interested parties, listens to their positions and invites them to present theirs.
This approach works just fine in Australia which is renowned for having the best consumer protection regime in the world. It's just harder to do in EU/US when there isn't an appetite for pro-consumer regulations.
And it's hilarious that you think that having to talk to the EU Commission to determine what is the law is somehow good. Businesses need certainty and predictability. Everything the EU regime is not.
> And it's hilarious that you think that having to talk to the EU Commission to determine what is the law is somehow good.
No, it's not hilarious. This is literally what industry says it wants: instead of dictates by uncaring government you get a dialog with the industry that shapes the policy and lets the authorities adjust their approach.
People have a misunderstanding of how these EU laws work.
They are designed to be flexible with all of the specifics left up to lawmakers to interpret. Which is understandable when you're dealing with so many technical issues which can't be anticipated ahead of time.
So there is no legal or technical definition of what is the "minimum required". There are high-level outcomes that require continuous negotiations to achieve.
And you can have consumer protections like Australia, UK etc that consists more of specific regulations rather than what the EU has.
The irony in all of this is that it was a set of fortuitous events that saved the company from bankruptcy, and being yet another footnote on computing history.
After being on the green, not only they got back to their former selfs, they do anything to avoid running out again of the money fountain.
You’re a broken clock that happens to be right. This isn’t “superfans protecting them”-Apple, it’s “lawyers protecting them”-Apple. Don’t conflate whatever leftover feelings you have about 2000s OS flame wars with whatever inane shit Apple is up to in 2024.
The superfans seem to be alive and well, at least here on HN. Just open some arbitrary thread here about a bad Apple policy decision.
Last instance of this that I noticed was the sudden, unannounced loss of support for self-signed certs for IMAP ("totally reasonable, who still uses those anyway?"), but there were earlier threads, e.g. about the possibility of 3rd-party clients for IMessage ("huge security risk!") etc etc.
I find it noticeable, became there is often such a jarring difference in those threads to the usual prevailing stances of the HN community on those issues. I'm pretty sure, Google, Microsoft or Facebook would be raked over the coals for the same decisions.
Apple fanboys earned their mockery, but the pendulum is definitely in the other direction right now (at least on HN). Simply disagreeing in Apple's favor on anything is enough to be branded a superfan. I get accused of it, and I've never even owned an iPhone or Mac.
In this thread, the anti-Apple replies lean much more toward the childish internet-shitposting style that is atypical of HN. E.g.:
"shilling"
"simping"
"I see your reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes."
Apple can definitely do wrong, but the companies manoeuvring against them are an order of magnitude worse.
I pay Apple and I’m their customer.
I’m the product of almost every other company that is even vaguely related to mobile devices — especially the companies pushing to force Apple to stop protecting their users from their depredations.
“It’s unfair we can’t exploit your customers to our own advantage!” seems to be the entirety of the arguments.
PS: I stopped buying Epic games years ago because of their generally sleazy behaviour. I just got an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple is the only company I can trust not to abuse AI mercilessly to my detriment. I’m sure that one or more people at Epic are working on using AI to better addict children to loot boxes or whatever, right now.
Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple...
My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)
So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.
The Android spec sheet added a line:
Encryption: Yes
Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever.
They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].
Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.
I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.
Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.
If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
By Epic, I'm assuming you don't mean the public interest research center in Washington, DC seeking to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age.
It's my fault that I wasn't clear in my request: I was specifically requesting some fundamentally new privacy-centric research paper, not pre-existing technologies like SELinux or x.509 being added as a check-list item to appease enterprise customers.
I.e.: From what I can tell, Google spends approximately $0 on privacy research such as security technology that only benefits end-users.
You linked to a bunch of security technologies that Google just copy-pasted into their products to compete with Apple and Microsoft, or to meet large customer requirements.
Also note that GCP is one of the few offerings Google has where the "users are the customers" instead of products. Despite this, there's nothing in that whitepaper you linked that impresses me as unique or special about GCP in comparison to AWS or Azure. I never hear anything out of Google that's even vaguely privacy-first, even in such divisions.
Linking to a paper with the word "privacy" in it from Facebook is just hilarious.
> Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3].
Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4]
You are confused. The implementation error is most likely an intentional backdoor that got discovered and reported, and they had to fix, but not too seriously. Except it got found out and reported again.
Remember when apple had their own JRE implementation (forked from sun's) and they were fixing well known vulnerabilities after months rather than hours like sun was doing?
> Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.
Their privacy protecting effort starts and end inside their marketing department. No engineering employee is involved in that. And judging by your posts, it seems their strategy is working great, and they can also mine your data and for money like everyone else as well, while convincing you otherwise.
Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company.
Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising.
Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year.
So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales.
Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart!
Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine.
(I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument.
You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant.
How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
I see the reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes.
The question that was asked:
> What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?
The response was given:
> Apple makes money from selling products.
Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers
And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.
What possible relevance does that have to someone who doesn’t want to be profiled? How does Apple’s end of year financial reports change anything at all on my side as a consumer?
It means their culture is user-first, advertising a distant afterthought. It’s not even in their top ten categories and isn’t broken out into its own reporting category. It tells you that they don’t care about advertising.
Compare this to Google or Facebook, both of which derive about 80-90% of their revenue from advertising, with all other services and products barely an afterthought.
Money, more than anything, drives corporate priorities, culture, and attitudes.
“Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” — James W Frick
If they didn’t care about it they wouldn’t do it. The reality is that they do and it’s a multi billion dollar per year revenue stream for them. You’re just making shit up here to avoid the obvious conclusion that despite Apple’s propaganda that you are the product on their platform as well.
That's an odd bone to pick given that Apple (along with Google) are the primary beneficiaries of gambling and other addictive/exploitative features provided by apps on their own platforms.
Apple haven't banned exploitation (e.g. loot boxes), they're just demanding a 30% cut of it.
Would you mind amending your comment to refer to the part of OP’s comment that you were actually referring to? Because I can’t for the life of me work out how what you’ve said remotely refutes anything they said.
Classic whatbaoutism, which is especially absurd when the comment started off with saying that Apple is certainly not perfect. They made their specific point.
I’m being serious. There’s a group of people here on HN (and Reddit) that have a seething hatred for Apple, but always for vague unstated reasons. The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” — said by people that prefer Google Android instead because clearly that is the paragon of user privacy.
So I ask you: please engage in conversation instead of name-calling.
> The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!”
You are completely out of your mind. That is never the argument used against Apple. As mentioned before, you can like your iPhone without simping for them.
Most of tech at my home is from Apple. My gf uses Apple exclusively.
I have seething hatred for Apple simps and blind fanatics that think their Cupertino dictator can’t do wrong. They’re just an extremely rich company that produces quality products - nothing more.
There's some interesting cliques in various subreddits and Hacker News, and it's always entertaining to see these groups get riled up when I defend their favourite boogieman.
My favourite is the small army of ex-Twitter employees frequenting HN who have a visceral hatred for Elon Musk and will rabidly hound anyone that says something even vaguely positive about anything he's ever touched.
There ware some entertaining foaming-at-the-mouth rants about how SpaceX is destroying wildlife with tap water.
Elon musk? Isn't he the guy that accuses of paedophilia anyone who dares disagree with him? Yeah I think he's an outstanding guy. Can't understand why anyone would dislike him really.
It's interesting that you can be "punished" by a judge in the EU for making a last minute request. This is considered standard practice in the US because it gives your opponents less time to organize or respond.
Maybe read the ruling? Apart from being in the US, Apple misrepresented their progress over multiple status reports, and then last minute acted like they need more time. Lets maybe not give the lawyers of trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt when they are employing obvious delay tactics, shall we?
You're talking about filing documents and arguments the other side has to respond to. The courts do NOT have patience for last-minute requests to bend procedure, because the side making a request wasn't acting in good faith. This isn't previously-unknown evidence being suddenly discovered. How many documents Apple has about this and how long it would take to go through them is stuff they could have known, should have known before this week.
Yeah, I thought another comment mentioned it was in the EU and read the article with that in mind. Good thing there's ten different people to gently inform me of that.
Leaving aside that this is clearly a case in the Northern District of California, no; that sort of thing is what gets discovery special masters appointed to keep you in line in the first place, and this ruling appears to be a discovery special master keeping a party in line.
