[STKFLT]

It is somewhat complicated by the specific requirements of the DMA specifications for Apple:

> The interoperability solutions for third parties will have to be equally effective to those available to Apple and must not require more cumbersome system settings or additional user friction. All features on Apple will have to make available to third parties any new functionalities of the listed features once they become available to Apple.

Apple is saying, "We designed our API in a way that requires trusted headphones as part of the privacy model, and DMA would force us to give everyone access to that API."

What goes unstated is that trusted headphones aren't necessary for the feature and a company trying to meaningfully comply with the spirit of the DMA probably would have chosen to implement the API differently.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...

[isodev]

And “trusted headphones” - all headphones, including AirPods, are untrusted until paired. This entire narrative that Apple is pushing is political, not technical.

[sceptic123]

Can you explain how you know that trusted headphones aren't necessary and where Apple is saying what you are quoting here?

[STKFLT]

Those are fair questions. This is what Apple says in the press release:

> Live Translation with AirPods uses Apple Intelligence to let Apple users communicate across languages. Bringing a sophisticated feature like this to other devices creates challenges that take time to solve. For example, we designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers either.

We know it isn't necessary because Apple believes it is possible and are working on it. That's a pretty good indication that Airpods and their associated stack are currently being treated differently for a feature which fundamentally boils down to streaming audio to and from the headphones. It's not even clear how 'securing' live translated audio is any different from 'securing' a FaceTime call in your native language. I think a reasonable reading sans more technical information from Apple is that they give Airpods more data and control over the device than is necessary, and they want us to be mad at the DMA for forcing them to fix it.

[atq2119]

Agreed. There is no sane reason why live translation and/or its privacy properties should depend on the specific headphones used. Even if the live translation were to happen in the headphones themselves, that should only tie the availability of the feature to the headphones. The privacy implications ought to be orthogonal.

I see three possibilities. Either the whole thing is made up entirely by Apple for bad faith reasons. Or some non-technical person with bad faith motivations at Apple suffered from some internal misunderstanding. Or somebody at Apple made some incredibly bad technical decisions.

Basically, there's no way that this isn't a screw up by somebody at Apple in some form. We just can't say which it is without additional information.

[timschmidt]

Official communications to an international governmental agency are surely checked by multiple employees and subject to review by lawyers, marketing, C suite, etc.

Apple said what they said. It wasn't a mistake. It was attempted deception.

[amluto]

Hmm, couldn’t Apple solve this properly with better technical measures? Right now, we have “Apple swears that its first-party AI system won’t exfiltrate data even though the OS doesn’t stop it from doing so” and “Apple doesn’t trust other vendors to pinky swear not to exfiltrate data”.

But Apple could instead have a sandbox that has no Internet access or other ability to exfiltrate anything, and Apple could make a serious effort to reduce or eliminate side channels that might allow a cooperating malicious app to collect and exfiltrate data from the translation sandbox. Everyone, including users of the first-party system, would win.