How EU digital identity rules and Google’s restrictive policies threaten the future of privacy-focused Android operating systems like GrapheneOS.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250810234024/https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/whos-afraid-of-privacy-focused-smartphones/
No, not everyone is good when they’re doing good things and bad when they’re doing bad things. The EU have been doing things that many, especially on here and reddit, consider “good” only because of their biases. They’re not objectively good things, but subjective. Things like forcing Apple to allow other payment methods was championed, but imagine if your business is forced to let your customers pay someone else to use your system, and then you’re the one that had to handle all their complaints because they got scammed.
The EU has been overstepping their bounds for years now. The difference now is that they’re doing things that everyone knows is authoritarian. They’ve been authoritarian all along, but the lefties were ok with it because it was authoritarianism that they agreed with.
EU does flex its power a lot, but the only case I know where you can say they are overstepping their authority was the money borrowing on the EU level during COVID-19 pandemic. Since they have no power of taxation, EU might not be able to repay its debts if countries don’t voluntary repay or other countries cover those debts.
Do you have other examples where they breached their authority?
The EU should have had no ability to make Apple allow alternative app stores or have to accept alternate in-app payments. They should have no ability to force Microsoft to give new users a choice to use a competitors browser on startup. For example.
Whether they should or shoudn’t is a different question though. You said “overstepping their bounds” and “they’re doing things that everyone knows is authoritarian”. If they have authority to do that, it can’t be that.
They just do whatever they want though, because there’s no one to pull them up.
Sure there is. There are multiple European Union courts and so far they complied with every single rulling. When they fail to do so, we can start talking about authoritarianism or abuse of power.
That is simply not case. Apple has extremely detailed list of payment methods they provide support over. And anything they do not support, they refer you to that payment provider or developer.
https://support.apple.com/en-vn/111741
Do you really think that the average person who pays in app by a non-Apple payment method is going to understand that Apple isn’t the company to contact given they have been for all this time?
App Store itself directs those people to 3rd parties in those cases.
What the app store says is irrelevant because people aren’t going to get their credit card details stolen via a app on their iPhone and then go read up on the app store who to contact - they’ll contact apple.
There are lots of people who make that assumption. These are also the most likely demographic to fall for a fake App Store scam.
That said, Apple have done a piss-poor job pruning their “Walled Garden”. If they really cared about user privacy, Facebook would have been banned multiple times for privacy violations.
When they could only pay via Apple’s payment processor in-app this wasn’t an issue. Now it is.
Yeah, I see why you were being called a bootlicker.
🤣 and I see we have another person who doesn’t understand why government overreach is a problem because they’re too busy saying “govern me harder daddy” and using terms like “anti-consumer” without knowing what they mean.
I’m sure you’re all for the EU getting access to all encrypted messaging systems too as long as they say it’s to stop the “far right”, right?
I don’t know why you think corporations aren’t effectively micro-governments themselves, ones that don’t even put on the show of democracy, beholden to essentially no one but their shareholders.
The difference is that products that corporations make don’t have to be like government run products. They don’t have to be for everyone. They don’t have to accept all payment methods. They don’t need to work inter-operably with other products. I’m ok with corporations being their own “micro-governments” and being beholden only to their shareholders, because that’s what I expect of them.
They can be for a very small subset of people, they can have features locked behind paywalls, they can have vendor lock in, they can only accept specific payment methods. If you don’t like what they do, you don’t have to use them. You think you’re entitled to use them how you want though, which is wrong.
The problem that people like you don’t understand is that the EU has started mandating that companies do things that are against their own interests, that actively harm them, and threatening them with gigantic fines if they don’t fall in line despite not doing anything illegal or wrong. People like you celebrate them strong arming companies this way because you didn’t like something that company did at moral level, when morals have no place in the conversation. Calling it “anti-consumer” just means “I as a consumer don’t like it” in most cases, not that it’s actually “anti-consumer” by definition.
Now the strong arming of foreign companies has shifted directly into surveillance and authoritarianism, and people like you don’t really have a leg to stand on when arguing against it because it’s what they’ve been doing all along and you congratulated them in doing so.