Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)

It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

I understand Apple's position on this one. This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data. It is also a very useful feature. The EU regulators are disallowing guardrails without which this backdoor will be used to strip-mine people's personal data. The privacy implications are not legible to most people.

If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the encryption doesn't have backdoors for the government but this gives you access to all the same data.

When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.

I find it interesting that Apple prefers to fall behind in Europe rather than opening their platform a tiny bit.

It gives us European some opportunities. I have a side project at work that was heavily threatened by Siri’s new features. Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming there anytime soon.

But overall I doubt we will replace Apple.

It's totally fine that Apple doesn't release this feature for EU customers. If they think they can still sell enough phones it's also fine I guess.

What's not fine, is to blame the EU for the missing feature. It's damaging their brand and damaging their reputation. Just think about if Porsche would make a press release and calling the US tariffs "un-American". Wouldn't be perceived well either.

In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law

    Access Denied
    
    Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed.

I'd rather have my iPhone turn into a dumbphone than EU bow to the Megacorps.

Why is there so much talk about privacy here? The DMA is an antitrust framework,the privacy argument is just the Apple spin of their refusal to comply

While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.

They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.

It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.

Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.

Good for the total of eight users that will then use an alternative agent once it landed. Similar to the twelve people that use alternative app stores.

> EU regulators on Tuesday slammed Apple

This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.

Good.

EU has the right to privacy.

Apple also has the right to not conduct business in EU.

If EU doesn’t like it, they can build their own sovereign software.

I really don't get why this wasn't a requirement that was baked in since the beginning.

Apple must know that they have customers in EU countries..?

What is the countdown to Germans outraged when someone from outside the EU is walking down the street and catches a fleeting audio clip of them which is processed by Apple's AI?

Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?

Does not address Apple’s specific allegation, that the EU demanded that competing AIs have direct systemwide access to all apps and data, while Apple wanted to add an intermediation layer which Siri or competitors would plug into, and which would force the same level of user visibility (a popup at the top) over any AI’s behavior.

I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.

What could Apple/Siri be asking for an exemption from that Google/Gemini has already complied with? Accessing iCloud photos to edit them? Parsing email etc?

Of all the crimes Big Tech is committing against humanity, Apple's attempt to safeguard user privacy is the one the EU cannot abide?

Revenge for killing Lightning port!

It would be nice if Europe had companies innovating at this level but it’s not happening. If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies, so I don’t even know at this point what the EU is trying to defend here.

All I know is we are buying the same devices designed by the US but keep increasing the list of features we can’t enjoy.

Whatever, this is why while I like some of their technology, I don't support spoiled brat behaviour with big margins.

Interesting how the "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute" cannot rollout due to privacy laws

Seems like a win for everyone.

Does this affect users that have a primary address in the EU or anyone with a phone that is _in_ the EU?

What does it even mean to "roll out in EU"?

These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny. Let's say I have several citizenships, live mostly in the EU, but currently stay in Japan, do I get the features or not?

Like app store regional gating and DVD regions, these restrictions are dinosaurs of the past.

It's all bullshit anyway. Apple could design a privacy framework around a fully integrated AI subsystem, "Do you want to allow ChatGPT access to Mail? (Developer message:) ChatGPT can read your emails to help summarize your inbox, or compose new mail."

This privilege system already exists. This is just marketing.

There is a widespread expectation here in the EU that every vendor in the world wants to access the common market and thus will accept any regulations and limitations that come with it.

Given that our share of global GDP has dropped from 25 to 17 per cent in twenty years, with a steady downward trend, I am not convinced that this principle will hold for much longer, and this case of Siri may be one of the canaries in the coalmine.

If/when we drop to single digits, many vendors won't likely care anymore.

There is a way to implement this functionality in an interoperable way that complies with the DMA. Apple just chose not to. Not because it's impossible to implement it in a privacy-respecting way, it just wants to lock people into their ecosystem, the exact thing DMA is protecting users against.

Apple realized its standard malicious compliance playbook won't fly this time, so now they're trying to sway public opinion by not rolling out this feature in the EU. It won't work. They're just going to lose market share and will have to backtrack when they do. Tech regulation doing its job.

That's fine, good actually. I wish these companies would go further tbh.

Like when the UK banned encryption I wish Apple would have just disabled iMessage entirely there. Show a message saying that due to UK law, they cannot operate an encrypted messaging service there any longer. The backlash would get that law changed pretty quick.

Instead they disabled encryption for the UK, making all of us less secure.

Apple stock is down more than 4% right now. That is a big dump for such a blue chip stock. IDK if it is due to this EU ban or Apple choice of going with Gemini (instead of making their own models).

I wonder how ChatGPT or Claude are actually GDPR compliant, but Apple has problems with Siri.

yeah, we are talking about giving random apps gain full control over your whole damn phone and every file in the filesystem.

If I were apple i'd want to give people enormous amounts to tools to control that access. Specific popups whenever it tries to access data (for the first time) from any given app. OpenAI would like access to all of your text messages, yes/no. I'd also want audit logs etc.

The nightmare is facebook (or the like) releasing an ai model into the current facebook app and forcing people to decide between looking at their grandkids pictures or allowing facebook to read your whole damn life into a database. So perhaps these apps need to be mandated as a connector for Apple Intelligence and nothing more.

I mean if you decide you want to give access to Google to everything on your phone, go for it. So far I trust apple, they haven't let me down yet. Placing these models on hardware is a great trust-building feature.

The EU is only interested in interoperability and centralization of data so they can put their citizens under surveillance. I hope Apple continues to exit this market on the edges.

Good. I wish the US had some privacy regulations as well. I can't believe how much credit folks are still giving Apple after all the BS they pulled (I mean direct Ad revenue is a $9 billion (and growing) business for Apple, and that's just the stuff they make public, not including search share revenue and other such deals).

Apparently their "Verifiable Transparency" claim just means Apple invited unnamed outside security experts and independent researchers to inspect and verify the integrity of (what they claim to be) its Private Cloud Compute code... LOL :)

I'll believe it when I can run the "private cloud compute" on my own hardware that I can firewall in my rack and monitor its network outputs.

Apple is right, EU wants to live in the stone age because of these laws, let them.

Even when Siri AI is using a locally installed LLM (with optional cloud models with E2EE), the EU still decides that it is not even enough.

This is why the EU is destined to lose and run itself to zero.

This is imperialism mentality, there are much divide in US politics and society but they seem to agree on trying to dominate and berate the UE in particular. I see it displayed even among progressive commentators it doesn't surprise me it is also reflected among progressive companies. But as soon as it comes to Trump or to China then it is not the same rethoric, stance, rashness at all. This selected stances and courages don't impress me at all. I also don't have much sympathy for Europe here, i guess Europe got what it deserves when you accept and do nothing to escape the fate to be a vassal you are rightfully treated like a vassal, nothing more.

Apple tries to market its product as privacy-focused, yet the privacy of their new AI features is so bad they don't meet EU standards? Is that the message here?

So, first they have to be regulated because Apple and Android form a duopoly. Then they want to get an exception that the other duopoly player does not get.

Of course, as usual they use their PR machine to blame the EU, whereas they really just want to abuse their platform's position to shut out competitors.

I have been a decades long Apple user, but their anti-competitive behavior, pushing ads into the OS and apps, and their treatment of developers (who made the iPhone big) is just gross.

Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

Exactly, that's actually why I LIKE this decision so much. I'm not on Apple's side, but I REALLY like the idea that a company just says, "Fine, we'll comply by not even offering this product." It's a perfectly legitimate choice, and it FORCED Apple to evaluate the pros and cons.

I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it. I like that Apple also is refusing to just bend over to the EU. We need more of these types of conflicts so we can work out good regulations, and not just always bend over and take it from whatever party won.

While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap. I like California's method of "to sell it here you have to have this but we're not going to sue you for selling a noncompliant product elsewhere."

Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.

As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met.

Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily.

But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

This is quite the contradiction.

> But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy

100% - just like Apple making such a grandiose show of "privacy" - "Privacy" for Apple eventually led to Apple specific and Apple-only allowed ads in first party apps and now Siri connecting to Google servers.

Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.

In the end Apple is a business and the EU is a dwindling market, they have to choose smart.

I think there's a reasonable question of whether the Siri stuff is even a feature that customers want. Additionally, money can not solve all problems, 9 people can't make a baby in a month, and if these sorts of regulations are serious at all like they are for medical regulation then you really do need to do the work of assessing risks, etc., and there's a chain of waterfall development to all that.

> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

The one legacy in Apple that Steve Jobs left behind is their distaste for taking risks that lose them money (ChatGPT was going to be their AI core... but then they had Altman ousted, so they backed away and partnered with Google instead), and spending money. I think they're still the only company with a kitchen in the valley that still makes employees pay for their own lunch, and the reason is the most BS reason that Steve Jobs pulled out of his rear end. It's so the employees appreciate the lunch, really?

Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.

> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.

I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.

While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.

Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.

Why is there so much talk about privacy here? The DMA is an antitrust framework,the privacy argument is just the Apple spin of their refusal to comply

Revenge for killing Lightning port!

What is the countdown to Germans outraged when someone from outside the EU is walking down the street and catches a fleeting audio clip of them which is processed by Apple's AI?

Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?

For context, under German law recording spoken words without consent is illegal. There is some nuances when speaking in public loud enough for strangers around to hear though

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

It's a geoblock. EU accounts can use the features when outside of the EU.

It's totally fine that Apple doesn't release this feature for EU customers. If they think they can still sell enough phones it's also fine I guess.

Good.

EU has the right to privacy.

Apple also has the right to not conduct business in EU.

If EU doesn’t like it, they can build their own sovereign software.

I'd rather have my iPhone turn into a dumbphone than EU bow to the Megacorps.

When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.

Of all the crimes Big Tech is committing against humanity, Apple's attempt to safeguard user privacy is the one the EU cannot abide?

Seems like a win for everyone.

I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.

This privilege system already exists. This is just marketing.

yeah, we are talking about giving random apps gain full control over your whole damn phone and every file in the filesystem.

Whatever, this is why while I like some of their technology, I don't support spoiled brat behaviour with big margins.

I find it interesting that Apple prefers to fall behind in Europe rather than opening their platform a tiny bit.

It gives us European some opportunities. I have a side project at work that was heavily threatened by Siri’s new features. Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming there anytime soon.

But overall I doubt we will replace Apple.

I'll believe it when I can run the "private cloud compute" on my own hardware that I can firewall in my rack and monitor its network outputs.

I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.

By who? The only US people who seem to like the tarrifs are the ones front running trades on their announcement.

I believe that the issue was that the EU wanted Apple to open up their new AI agent interface (the ability to control every app on your phone so Siri can call you an Uber or whatever), and Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate.

This doesn't have anything to do with privacy.

The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.

Why is everyone conflating GDPR with DMA? DMA is literally the anti-thesis of GDPR in that, by design, it makes the ecosystem less secure, not more.

EU does not want privacy. They actually want to get rid of privacy every so often (adding backdoors in encrypted conversations). So far it has not worked out, but I’m afraid they will succeed at one point.

To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh.

I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an European would really much like my government to stop asking ridiculous things that do not profit the consumer.

If they can comply with China’s unreasonable demands, they can comply with the completely reasonable EU demands.

They already claim to care about your freedom and privacy. Now they can prove it.

It's not about privacy. It's more like if Siri is allowed to read your emails, then Gemini and ChatGPT should too. If anything it's opposite of privacy protection.

Exactly. Apple is playing a dangerous game here, they damage their brand for many pro-Europeans.

It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.

The way Apple Health exchanges data with 3rd-party trackers (Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) is very well built and a good model of how other components in iOS could allow data exchange with very granular permissions.

Apple touts the "Private Cloud Compute". If they found a way to share your personal context to process on their cloud in a private and anonymized way, there is no reason the same process couldn't be used to handoff data to a 3rd party AI provider.

iPhones have pretty good privacy controls. I don’t see how they can’t extend those to cover AI apps. I imagine the settings menu will get bonkers though. User education about apps slurping up all your data is needed regardless. People just trust apple with their talk of private cloud computing.

> This is essentially a backdoor into all of your data.

No. Only if you would consider the Linux/macos/windows filesystem API a backdoor too. On your desktop any app with sufficient permissions can read all your data. Would you call that a backdoor?

Why do you use the phrase backdoor?

Is Apple incapable of designing a permissions system that allows a user to grant access to email and messages to an app of their choice?

We already download apps and grant them permissions to subsections of personal data on our devices.

I don’t believe Apple is incapable of designing a system that respects a user’s choices and granted permissions.

it's more Apple's attempt to prevent users to choose their own models. Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index. They could implement a big warning that shows "if you proceed with this request, Spotlight will send this and that to the model provider." But Apple chose not to do that.

Interesting how the "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute" cannot rollout due to privacy laws

Have you considered that the EU's privacy laws may simply be onerous and burdensome, and the fact that a web of red tape has caught another fly may not actually reflect on the privacy claims of "groundbreaking Private Cloud Compute"?

The DMA is not a privacy law.

Yes because DMA doesn’t force 3rd parties to be groundbreakingly secure.

Literally anyone could whip up an AI service, get people to use it and just browse the unencrypted logs for data to sell.

Which is the issue Apple is having.

put quotes on privacy laws.

I really don't get why this wasn't a requirement that was baked in since the beginning.

Apple must know that they have customers in EU countries..?

They’re already two years behind on this. And they’re only launching with one language anyway.

It’s not like the feature is fully finished.

If it took another year to get out the door and be compliant, do you think they would’ve wanted to wait? Or do you think they would rather launch now and then provide a compliant version later?

Big tech companies have gotten used to laws not applying to them.

What could Apple/Siri be asking for an exemption from that Google/Gemini has already complied with? Accessing iCloud photos to edit them? Parsing email etc?

google/gemini has not complied properly to DMA in android AFAIK

What does it even mean to "roll out in EU"?

These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny. Let's say I have several citizenships, live mostly in the EU, but currently stay in Japan, do I get the features or not?

Like app store regional gating and DVD regions, these restrictions are dinosaurs of the past.

It's referring to legal jurisdiction, not anyone's personal relationship with nationality or residence.

You will get the features when you're in Japan, and have them for about 2 weeks when back in the EU, then they will be disabled until you leave again.

I mean, borders still exist, and laws apply within borders. I don't believe that national (or supra-national in the EU's case) sovereignty is yet a dinosaur of the past.

In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law

    Access Denied
    
    Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed.

[this comment is not available to readers in the EU in compliance with EU law]

it's denial all the way down, but i don't see the circle, hence i am denying to upvote ;-)

Good for the total of eight users that will then use an alternative agent once it landed. Similar to the twelve people that use alternative app stores.

Why make fun of freedom?

Have some dignity. We all deserve the right to fully own our general compute devices.

The whole point is to try and avoid ending up in situations like this, where apple were able to extort 30% of app store revenue because they dictate how people are allowed to use their devices.

AltStore is hugely popular, and that is DESPITE Apple going out of their way to scare people into using the App Store.

> “We have hundreds of thousands of users,” AltStore co-founder Testut told TechCrunch in an interview. “Wonderful and good numbers.”

Zero idea if its true tho.

it's still being litigated wrt to alternative app stores: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/04/epic-games-asks-u-s-supreme-c...

the core technology fee is a big obstacle to alternative app stores.

openclaw is massively popular. there is a lot of diversity in "persona" agents, which are different than coding agents or the agent apple demoed. they're not all the same.

i don't know, i don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.

> EU regulators on Tuesday slammed Apple

This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.

Depends on the news you read I guess, to me the word "slammed" is pretty commonplace in politics news-reporting and has been for a while (read: well before the modern take-down content that's so common to social media platforms).

Apple stock is down more than 4% right now. That is a big dump for such a blue chip stock. IDK if it is due to this EU ban or Apple choice of going with Gemini (instead of making their own models).

If the market is reacting to the Gemini news now, something is wrong. This has been a known fact for months.

Apple stock rises leading up to WWDC and then drops following the keynote every single year. People keep betting that this is the year that they're going to announce the next iPhone and the stock is going to 10x.

The whole market is down

All I know is we are buying the same devices designed by the US but keep increasing the list of features we can’t enjoy.

> If you make a list of tentative companies that would integrate their stuff to the OS like Siri it’s very likely all those are major US companies

Mistral. I’d bet my bottom dollar that the French are the reason the EU is holding firm on its position.

I wonder how ChatGPT or Claude are actually GDPR compliant, but Apple has problems with Siri.

What's to wonder. Those third party apps are not part of the core OS and others apps can't access them.

I'd instead wonder why Google and Microsoft seemingly don't have to comply with the DMA.

Because this is not related to the GDPR at all, but the Digital Markets Act (DMA). It's purpose is to enable competition and not allow big tech to abuse their market dominance (e.g. in this case Apple not wanting to grant any competition the same access to MacOS so that they don't have to face competition for Siri AI).

This isn't GDPR, it's DMA. They're not subject to it.

The EU is only interested in interoperability and centralization of data so they can put their citizens under surveillance. I hope Apple continues to exit this market on the edges.

I don't think the GDPR came from an effort to surveil, but the world has changed in the last ten years and I do agree with this assessment today.

One of the main rights enabled by the GDPR is to request to have data deleted, how would that facilitate surveillance?

Ah yes the well known EU equivalent of the CIA, NSA

The one that’s so secret it’s not in any of the treaties that the sovereign nations that comprise the EU signed up for and implemented in line with their own democratic processes

That agency

Meanwhile they struggle to put together a border patrol, but advanced pan European surveillance apparatus that isn’t run by the US. Yeah bro

Apple is right, EU wants to live in the stone age because of these laws, let them.

Right, wanting operability, alternative default apps, equal access to APIs is "wanting to live in the stone age". POSIX is the stone age model, and Microsoft is the future.

Too many bootlickers here now. Such a shame.

Even when Siri AI is using a locally installed LLM (with optional cloud models with E2EE), the EU still decides that it is not even enough.

This is why the EU is destined to lose and run itself to zero.

This is about the Digital Markets Act, its not the EU saying it isn't secure enough, they are saying users should be able to choose to use the same functionality but with different AI providers.

Compliance with DMA would have Apple hand over system-wide access to AI features to third parties, which could compromise user privacy and security.

Does this affect users that have a primary address in the EU or anyone with a phone that is _in_ the EU?

The APIs in iOS that turn feature flags on/off as you travel now have gotten insanely complex. Some are on time triggers, some change instantly, some depend on where your iCloud account was setup, AFAIK there isn't a black and white answer as to what happens when you move a non-EU iPhone through Europe anymore, "it depends". It's similarly vague in the other direction.

Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.

I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.

From past experience, it is when you are physically in the EU, but this implementation could obviously differ from how they've gated features in the past.

So, first they have to be regulated because Apple and Android form a duopoly. Then they want to get an exception that the other duopoly player does not get.

Of course, as usual they use their PR machine to blame the EU, whereas they really just want to abuse their platform's position to shut out competitors.

I have been a decades long Apple user, but their anti-competitive behavior, pushing ads into the OS and apps, and their treatment of developers (who made the iPhone big) is just gross.

EU wants people to be able to plug any model into the new Siri system that will have unlimited access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc.

Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.

Very different than the narrative you're pushing

That's fine, good actually. I wish these companies would go further tbh.

Instead they disabled encryption for the UK, making all of us less secure.

There is a saying "American trust companies more than their government, Europeans trust their governments more than companies" when nobody should trust either.

Sometimes a company's incentives are going to be aligned with their users, but a lot of the times they won't and consumer protection regulation is useful.

Sometimes a government will have the good of their citizens in mind, and a lot of the times they will seek money and power just like companies do. Lobbies, fines, overreaching regulation.

The UK (and EU's attempted Chat Control) is some fascist bullshit. But allowing you to own the device you paid for and use it as you please (including letting you install whatever software you choose to) isn't.

There is a widespread expectation here in the EU that every vendor in the world wants to access the common market and thus will accept any regulations and limitations that come with it.

If/when we drop to single digits, many vendors won't likely care anymore.

> Europe accounted for nearly 27% of Apple's total sales in its last fiscal year

I don't know about every vendor, but Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales.

Apple tries to market its product as privacy-focused, yet the privacy of their new AI features is so bad they don't meet EU standards? Is that the message here?

It's the inverse problem. EU wants anyone to be able to install a different AI agent onto their phone with the same access as Siri. Apple says "no- we need time to figure out how that would work, we want other agents to meet the same privacy standards of PCC/on-device that Siri uses". Which EU said no.

I don't think there's a clear good guy/bad guy here.

I am not very sympathetic to apple here, but I think the legislation in question is more to do with competition than data privacy.

This conflict applies to many tools that require high privileges:

* If you allow the user to grant those privileges to third-party applications, they can grant it to applications that abuse it, resulting in security and privacy risks. You might even be blamed for allowing them access (e.g. the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal).

* If you don't allow the user to do that, third-party tools won't be able to serve those needs, which can be considered anti-competitive preferential treatment of your own tools.

The interoperability of their AI doesn't meet EU standards.

You've got to be delusional if you think the EU has a good grasp of AI.

Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.

In the end Apple is a business and the EU is a dwindling market, they have to choose smart.

For context, under German law recording spoken words without consent is illegal. There is some nuances when speaking in public loud enough for strangers around to hear though

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.

> But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy

Indeed. If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iPhone backups by default. But since they don't, US law enforcement can request my iMessage chats because the people I talk to (probably) do not have ADP enabled (which enables end-to-end encryption for backups).

Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily.

This is quite the contradiction.

No, this isn't the claim.

EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.

Apple says "We can't do this in a privacy preserving way".

> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.

In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.

The exemption Apple wanted was not from a privacy law, but from the DMA. They never claimed to have an issue meeting their privacy laws when using their own product, it was other people's products that they said they couldn't guarantee the privacy of.

Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...

>But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.

You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.

The issue here isn't EU privacy laws (which Apple has been historically quite good at complying with, by big tech standards); it's EU _competition_ laws.

There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law

Lemma 1: you want to protect your users privacy, and are also beholden to regulation enforcing that commitment (GDPR).

Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).

Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.

This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.

Apple is providing a level of privacy far beyond what the laws require. It would be easy if they only wanted to comply with GDPR and DMA.

Protecting user privacy and reducing surface area for litigation against the business can happen simultaneously. Not that it is, but just saying, politics and difficult to define thresholds muddy the waters.

In this case it looks much simpler: Apple strictly does not want to open up the iOS platform to other competing agents, as they lose the monopolistic moat if they do. While making a true developer platform with good documentation is often hard and expensive, with the market access they'd get, companies would gladly jump on it even if it was badly documented as long as they have guarantees of continued legal access.

At the same time, this potentially opens up the entire worldwide market (imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork), and they probably made the estimation that keeping EU out is still better value (70% of the market all to themselves) than fair competition in the 100% of the market (I guess they estimate they might get less than 70% in that case).

Or they are hoping that EU customers will want Siri AI enough to campaign for a change, but I'd find that highly unlikely.

Those requirements are explicitly on the outcomes because companies like Apple used to abuse loopholes in previous, non-outcome defined laws. They, as always, have no one to blame but themselves.

A lot of regulation is legally defined in terms of outcomes. That in itself isn't unusual. Checklists of technical requirements are almowt always a derivative and a suggestion about a safe path to meet the regulated outcome. This is how "blessed" standards for e.g. medical devices work. This shields the laws themselves from overly technical discussions.

The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.

> but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met

This is true of most things that involve legal. Laws are not code, in basically any jurisdiction they are subject to interpretation, and just because you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, doesn't mean an enterprising enforcement agency won't still come after you

EU laws are written like this to give companies maximum freedom in how they implement their solutions, not to lay traps for them to fall into.

No amount of people can make any amount babies, it's an unrelated chemical process, never cared for that analogy.

> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.

I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.

It's a geoblock. EU accounts can use the features when outside of the EU.

Interesting, I would have guessed the opposite as geoblocking is not perfect, unless it's using location services as well.

Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous.

The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior.

Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).

Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.

To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering.

I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.

Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?

> completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc

So Google chose to be evil, now they have to rip all the evil out and redo it from scratch. Can't say I have any sympathy. Should have done the right thing from the start.

The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.

There wouldn't need to be a redo if the products had been built with compliance in mind. This law isn't something new; it's been around for years now. Not taking it into account from the beginning with the intention of operating in the jurisdiction means there's definitely intention to skirt. Particularly given the previous issues in the same department.

It’s not an enormous effort if you plan for it. They clearly knew about this, and could’ve afforded to plan for it. Their whole shtick is locking users in, and DMA is their nemesis.

You're essentially saying that privacy violations are baked into the cores of these systems.

Why does systems are not designed take into account that compliance work?

It's also not a "two-pizza team" market.

So, what are the chances they'd completely redo multiple core systems in the 18 months they asked for?