Caught in a trap
That’s going to be fine for some entities, but companies that want to build businesses on your data will be disadvantaged by those decisions. Apple’s approach is that by defining the space, it also knows precisely what it must do to compete within it. That’s going to make for a far more equal playing field as AI hardware reaches the market.
A second outcome Apple may also be looking at is that by challenging regulators to sit down and declare what data and privacy rights consumers should enjoy in an AI digital age, it also identifies terms of reference to inform how its future AR glasses handle and process external video. Right now, it’s plausible to imagine a similar arrangement in which actual video is never stored, just classified and summarized like audio in Siri Recap.
And, of course, one final potential outcome might be that if Apple manages to convince the EU that its system provides an appropriate balance between consumer privacy and security and third-party product design, then it may forge a path through the impasse that currently stops Apple Intelligence from working in the EU. This could be a blueprint of the intermediary architecture Apple originally proposed to the EU when it first introduced Apple Intelligence. We’ll have to see if Europe accepts that.
