Bel.Air
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EU's latest demand on Apple about geolocking is unforgivably naive
This article should be marked as opinion or even hot take. Apart from what other commenters already stated, there are other misunderstood concepts here about Apple app store restrictions:
1) Apple requires the country on your Apple ID account to match the country of the credit card on file. And the App store content is quite different depending on country (which, if you had asked someone from an EU country you would know.).
2) For those still skeptical a simple example of why this is an annoyance: as a EU citizen you travel (visa-free, without a passport - thanks EU!) from Denmark to say, Greece. There, you have NO extra roaming fee (thanks EU!), public health insurance (thanks EU!), and say you want to download the local public transit app for Athens. And surprise surprise, Apple tells you that the app is not available in your country's App store!
From a EU standpoint this is a ridiculous limitatiom, it's non-compliant with single market regulations and the free movement of goods and services across the EU, so of course the European Commission is doing its job by enforcing it. Basically there should be another tier available (call it Region) that developers should take advantage of, instead of only toggling between Global/1 country. It isn't at all that complex and shouldn't be that big of an issue.
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EU carriers want Apple's Private Relay blocked
The difference here is presumably scale. The sheer scale of Apple's product base means any new service rollout basically instantly creates (or crushes) a market or niche, in this case millions of users could potentially go "dark" after an iOS update.
What I understand from their argument is if you feel the need for protection there are pretty good tools out there and you're free to use them, but it's unreasonable to make it the (almost) default option for anyone as this could quickly lead to having rule of law undermined by bad actors (yes I know it sounds like the FBI San Bernardino argument, because it kind of is really).
ISPs have a legal obligation to record specific data and hand it over to law enforcement if requested to do so. Privacy is all fun and games until shit hits the fan, and you're not able to investigate basic crimes because everyone is able to fly under the radar by the flick of a setting.. all because libertarian ideas are overly represented in tech. I'd argue the whole privacy argument out of California isn't doing much in the way of freedom of speech or protecting human rights in many places around the world, and not even that good at protecting people from super precise and intrusive ad targeting (because most people want and accept it anyway).
