10 ms·

You are not a big fan of the EU after this? They seem to care more about privacy and rights of the people within the majority of the countries that make up the

by bimguy 3y ago

You are not a big fan of the EU after this? They seem to care more about privacy and rights of the people within the majority of the countries that make up the EU then any other outside country that I could name. Then again, I'm not American so I can easily see the influence your country has on most other countries, so to say the "EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens" is completely ignorant and oblivious.

pg_1234 3y ago
The EU should make a public service announcement. Something along the lines of: "We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance." ... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ... ... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.
- capr 3y ago
  "forced" to block... seems like the only ones who can use force is them
- zuppy 3y ago
  no, they shouldn't, this will affect customers who already purchased the product and have no fault in this silly war that apple wants to start. no matter what they do, it should only apply to new devices.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    Excuse me, Apple started it? That's absurd. Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace. The EU started this fight; Apple is just doing whatever they can to resist change.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace You literally just described Apple "starting it". They took the initial action (~15 years ago, by your words), starting it, and the other parties reacted, after that action.
      - simondotau 3y ago
        I’m sorry, what fight did Apple start with the EU fifteen years ago? You do know what a fight is, right?
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        They started engaging in the sort of anticompetitive behavior that the EU laws in question were written to discourage or forbid, as you yourself noted when you pointed out that apple's actions took place before said legislative reactions. Here's the quote from you: > Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years Apple could have started out being more consumer friendly from the beginning, and it wouldn't have been starting a fight with consumers. But they didn't, and now they're reaping the consequences.
        simondotau 3y ago
        That's a wholly different claim than the one I disagreed with. Be careful with your language. Opposing a powerful entity's behaviour is not an excuse for sloppy language or misleading hyperbole. In fact it's especially important to avoid it because the powerful entity only needs to re-frame the criticism around that hyperbole and then proceed to factually disprove it. Regardless, your new framing is still a ridiculous claim. To suggest that Apple was being "anti-competitive" in 2009 is self-evidently absurd — because their marketplace was simply too small to matter with respect to any competition regulation. They grew their marketplace under the supposedly "unfair" rules which means that the rules cannot be framed as an antitrust violation. This is arguably the most significant point of fact which lost Epic their case against Apple. If you disagree, then you need explain why every two-bit little nobody who creates any kind of marketplace of any size shouldn't be required to follow strict market fairness rules. Under that logic, Tide could force your local chicken shop to sell Tide products, because they should be entitled to fair access to that chicken marketplace.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  or more likely learn extremely quickly that their citizens prefer their iPhones to their politicians, there would be protests within the hour if they ever blocked iPhones. Weird to me how common it has become in the last 5 years for people to gleefully cheer for tyranny and control.
  - VladTheImpalor 3y ago
    You mean the tyranny and control of Apple? With their removing headphone jack, lightning cable, walled garden and all that?
    - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
      A product you consent to is hardly the same as the government cutting off the ability to use your phone and it sounds very silly to compare the two. By no means do I agree with the walled garden, I just think cheering for such an absurd idea of the government disabling your phone to fight something most users don't even understand or care about is bizarre.
      - Etherlord87 3y ago
        > A product you consent to is hardly the same as[...] ...The government you also consent to in elections and by deciding where you live? I'm so sick of this argument: you chose to buy iPhone, it was your decision... But a large part of the law protects citizens against their bad judgement: we don't allow slave contracts or selling your organs. Within some use-cases, and to a larger degree within some groups of people, Apple is a monopolist. People get *addicted* from Apple ecosystem. If you had a Mercedes house, with a Mercedes charger to your Mercedes Car, that you would park on a Mercedes parking spot near your workplace, it wouldn't be so easy to replace your car with another brand.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - no_time 3y ago
chargingmarmot 3y ago
Well, yeah, but isn't the EU also responsible for all the trash cookie-consent notifications I get from every website now? Overall, I'm happy they're actively involved. The hands-off attitude in the US is terrible.
- frankvdwaal 3y ago
  No, it's the builders of the consent notifications who are responsible for that. They are often skirting or even breaking EU law to make it a headache to refuse. The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance. Having to click to another screen to do that is... not that. In reality a cookie consent notification can just as well be a small widget somewhere with an accept and refuse button, but it's the builders of these frameworks that have a vested interest in getting you to press accept. I've applied for a job at one of these companies about a year ago, and I asked them about it. They said to me that according to their metrics, there's about 30% more acceptance if they only bury their Refuse button, so it's a legal risk they are willing to take. Needless to say, when they invited me for a second conversation, I politely refused. No, the shitty cookie screens with dark patterns is not the responsibility of the EU - although you could make the argument that the EU should have been stricter or more prescriptive.
  - mft_ 3y ago
    It's not just the dark-pattern cookie popups that are a problem - it's having any mandatory cookie popups --even the fairly-designed ones-- on virtually every website that you ever open. That's what's crappy about the implementation. I once read a light-hearted analysis of the cumulative time wasted by humanity due to the original USB plugs/sockets being unidirectional. I suspect a similar analysis of these cookie popups would be shocking. Hah, first Google hit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billions-hours-now-being-wasted-clicking-web-site-cookie-tas-dienes/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billions-hours-now-being-wast.... (Not sure I agree with the numbers used, but the order of magnitude probably isn't too far wrong)
    - MaKey 3y ago
capr 3y ago
Ya, can't square the two? Check this out: violence actually works, so should we beat our kids?
xgl5k 3y ago
The EU is not exactly doing this exclusively for privacy. This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.
- _cenw 3y ago
  Why do Americans always read backroom politics into everything. How does the GDPR help EU tech companies? I hope you're not about to tell me it's a ploy to bundle up resources for compliance in US companies or it levels the ground for the EU to be able to compete somehow. It caused enough headaches for us too. Sometimes a good thing is just a good thing. The US supposedly was a country that had laws made without sinister corporatism at work at one point too.
- DirkH 3y ago
  An alternative - and you have to admit reasonable counter-hypothesis - is that everything you just wrote as a belief is - to some degree - American Cope to explain away why the US can't have what Europe does. Also known as projection.
michalu 3y ago
> You are not a big fan of the EU after this? Downloading apps from internet is a very cheap price for becoming a "big fan of EU" :D

by bimguy 3y ago

pg_1234 3y ago

The EU should make a public service announcement. Something along the lines of: "We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance." ... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ... ... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.

capr 3y ago
"forced" to block... seems like the only ones who can use force is them
zuppy 3y ago
no, they shouldn't, this will affect customers who already purchased the product and have no fault in this silly war that apple wants to start. no matter what they do, it should only apply to new devices.
- simondotau 3y ago
  Excuse me, Apple started it? That's absurd. Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace. The EU started this fight; Apple is just doing whatever they can to resist change.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    > Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace You literally just described Apple "starting it". They took the initial action (~15 years ago, by your words), starting it, and the other parties reacted, after that action.
    - simondotau 3y ago
      I’m sorry, what fight did Apple start with the EU fifteen years ago? You do know what a fight is, right?
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        They started engaging in the sort of anticompetitive behavior that the EU laws in question were written to discourage or forbid, as you yourself noted when you pointed out that apple's actions took place before said legislative reactions. Here's the quote from you: > Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years Apple could have started out being more consumer friendly from the beginning, and it wouldn't have been starting a fight with consumers. But they didn't, and now they're reaping the consequences.
        simondotau 3y ago
        That's a wholly different claim than the one I disagreed with. Be careful with your language. Opposing a powerful entity's behaviour is not an excuse for sloppy language or misleading hyperbole. In fact it's especially important to avoid it because the powerful entity only needs to re-frame the criticism around that hyperbole and then proceed to factually disprove it. Regardless, your new framing is still a ridiculous claim. To suggest that Apple was being "anti-competitive" in 2009 is self-evidently absurd — because their marketplace was simply too small to matter with respect to any competition regulation. They grew their marketplace under the supposedly "unfair" rules which means that the rules cannot be framed as an antitrust violation. This is arguably the most significant point of fact which lost Epic their case against Apple. If you disagree, then you need explain why every two-bit little nobody who creates any kind of marketplace of any size shouldn't be required to follow strict market fairness rules. Under that logic, Tide could force your local chicken shop to sell Tide products, because they should be entitled to fair access to that chicken marketplace.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
or more likely learn extremely quickly that their citizens prefer their iPhones to their politicians, there would be protests within the hour if they ever blocked iPhones. Weird to me how common it has become in the last 5 years for people to gleefully cheer for tyranny and control.
- VladTheImpalor 3y ago
  You mean the tyranny and control of Apple? With their removing headphone jack, lightning cable, walled garden and all that?
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    A product you consent to is hardly the same as the government cutting off the ability to use your phone and it sounds very silly to compare the two. By no means do I agree with the walled garden, I just think cheering for such an absurd idea of the government disabling your phone to fight something most users don't even understand or care about is bizarre.
    - Etherlord87 3y ago
      > A product you consent to is hardly the same as[...] ...The government you also consent to in elections and by deciding where you live? I'm so sick of this argument: you chose to buy iPhone, it was your decision... But a large part of the law protects citizens against their bad judgement: we don't allow slave contracts or selling your organs. Within some use-cases, and to a larger degree within some groups of people, Apple is a monopolist. People get *addicted* from Apple ecosystem. If you had a Mercedes house, with a Mercedes charger to your Mercedes Car, that you would park on a Mercedes parking spot near your workplace, it wouldn't be so easy to replace your car with another brand.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- no_time 3y ago

chargingmarmot 3y ago

Well, yeah, but isn't the EU also responsible for all the trash cookie-consent notifications I get from every website now? Overall, I'm happy they're actively involved. The hands-off attitude in the US is terrible.

frankvdwaal 3y ago
No, it's the builders of the consent notifications who are responsible for that. They are often skirting or even breaking EU law to make it a headache to refuse. The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance. Having to click to another screen to do that is... not that. In reality a cookie consent notification can just as well be a small widget somewhere with an accept and refuse button, but it's the builders of these frameworks that have a vested interest in getting you to press accept. I've applied for a job at one of these companies about a year ago, and I asked them about it. They said to me that according to their metrics, there's about 30% more acceptance if they only bury their Refuse button, so it's a legal risk they are willing to take. Needless to say, when they invited me for a second conversation, I politely refused. No, the shitty cookie screens with dark patterns is not the responsibility of the EU - although you could make the argument that the EU should have been stricter or more prescriptive.
- mft_ 3y ago
  It's not just the dark-pattern cookie popups that are a problem - it's having any mandatory cookie popups --even the fairly-designed ones-- on virtually every website that you ever open. That's what's crappy about the implementation. I once read a light-hearted analysis of the cumulative time wasted by humanity due to the original USB plugs/sockets being unidirectional. I suspect a similar analysis of these cookie popups would be shocking. Hah, first Google hit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billions-hours-now-being-wasted-clicking-web-site-cookie-tas-dienes/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billions-hours-now-being-wast.... (Not sure I agree with the numbers used, but the order of magnitude probably isn't too far wrong)
  - MaKey 3y ago

capr 3y ago

Ya, can't square the two? Check this out: violence actually works, so should we beat our kids?

xgl5k 3y ago

The EU is not exactly doing this exclusively for privacy. This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.

_cenw 3y ago
Why do Americans always read backroom politics into everything. How does the GDPR help EU tech companies? I hope you're not about to tell me it's a ploy to bundle up resources for compliance in US companies or it levels the ground for the EU to be able to compete somehow. It caused enough headaches for us too. Sometimes a good thing is just a good thing. The US supposedly was a country that had laws made without sinister corporatism at work at one point too.
DirkH 3y ago
An alternative - and you have to admit reasonable counter-hypothesis - is that everything you just wrote as a belief is - to some degree - American Cope to explain away why the US can't have what Europe does. Also known as projection.

michalu 3y ago

> You are not a big fan of the EU after this? Downloading apps from internet is a very cheap price for becoming a "big fan of EU" :D