No, this is unrelated from privacy. The issue is that the EU won’t allow the new Siri because Apple isn’t willing to open up the system enough for 3rd party AI agents to get the same functionality.
Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.
> It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
Apple made it sound like their proposal for that was rejected by the EU. And it would be consistent with previous regulatory decisions by the EU for them to not want Apple to be setting the rules for how third-party interoperability partners/competitors ensure privacy.
It seems to me that the EU has a preference for protecting privacy with legal mechanisms, and generally doesn't approve of Apple's attempts to protect privacy with technical mechanisms because that inevitably limits interoperability with systems that aren't designed around the same restrictions and assumptions.
I’m sure they love it when Apple says, “Well… they COULD give us their models to put in private compute, but we’re not paying them for that and they’re not getting any more data than we get, ourselves. Which is exactly none.”
Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?
For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.
Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?
It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.
Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.
EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.
Uhm no, EU privacy laws are actually pretty simple: do not collect data you don't need without asking consent from a user first.
Which should IMO be the basic principle worldwide. But unfortunately in many countries, companies are more powerful than governments/regulators, so they get to grab everything they can get their hands on.