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18 days agoThe DMA basically says, “if Siri can work with your personal data, you have to allow the AI assistants from Zuck, Elon and Honest Achmed the same access”.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM: it’s not a privacy thing, it’s a competition thing.
Personally, I’d be mildly interested in all the dark patterns Meta would bring to bear to finally get at Apple users’ most private data. Even though it’d damage my trust in humanity even further, I guess.
This is probably the best outcome for everyone, including Apple.
So they have Siri AI which you can give extensive access to your private information, presumably so it can help you better. It is reasonable to assume you trust Apple to some extent already, since you use their product. And if not, you can just disallow access using their privacy infrastructure which you probably trust because otherwise you wouldn’t entrust the device with anything valuable in the first place.
But now the EU comes along and says, if you can have this privileged position, you need to give it to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk too so we can have some fair competition. Meanwhile Apple thinks, “I made this feature to sell more devices, I actually don’t care much if the user really uses it so no skin off my back if it’s disabled, and I can make sure that my prompts don’t employ any dark patterns because that undermines my whole PRiVaCY angle to why iPhone is superior, however I cannot really ensure that Meta and Grok won’t lie to and threaten the user until they give up and give them their private data which is all these companies are really interested in.”
So now Apple can point to the DMA and say “we do this because privacy is the most important thing everrr”, the EU can point to this and say “we do this because fair competition is what we’re about”, and EU citizens don’t get their arms twisted into exposing everything about themselves. And even if you’re immune, your social graph by and large isn’t.
Getting some freedoms means that someone will try to exploit your ability to exercise them. If you can plausibly show that you have no control, you win the game of Chicken, like a driver who throws out their steering wheel, visibly, before accelerating towards their opponent.