Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Apple protects its customers from privacy threats, but not from Apple's own predatory, privacy-invasive, rent-extracting conduct. Apple also gets to unilaterally decide which scams are permitted on its platform and which ones are not, and they alone get to decide when to allow secret, pervasive surveillance of Apple customers.</p><p>Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:<br>(...)<br>How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments."</p><p><a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/emp</span><span class="invisible">ty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/EU" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>EU</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Apple" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Apple</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Privacy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Privacy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DataProtection" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DataProtection</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Monopolies</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Oligopolies</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Interoperability" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Interoperability</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GDPR" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GDPR</span></a></p>