- New regulations will target six major tech companies to improve consumer experience and data privacy. These include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft.
- Pre-installed apps like weather and email that are difficult to delete will be disallowed, aiming to promote interoperability and reduce “gatekeeping” activities.
- Companies will be prohibited from monetizing user data collected from phone apps for advertising purposes.
- The regulations will encourage competition by allowing alternative payment systems, benefiting startups and consumers.
- The European Commission aims to empower consumers and ensure tech giants adhere to European rules, providing immediate accountability for any issues.
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Once more, the EU being leader when it comes to users’ rights and keeping the big companies accountable for their shady practices. 👍
Sometimes i wish i lived there :')
As a Canadian, I appreciate a lot of what the EU does when it comes to consumer protections. Hopefully this one also ends up impacting the rest of us!
Same, my American brother, same. (I’m from Chile btw) 🇨🇱✌️
Excellent use of the word, my friend.
One urgent thingis that the EU follow the UK in abandoning the ill-conceived “client-side scanning”, aka Chat-Control.
Both have laws like that in the making and beside tiny formalities the UK sadly didn’t abandone it at all! :/
As a Brit, me too.
You caught my attention.
How has life changed for you since Brexit?
Not the person you asked, but for me:
- In 2017 I lost my £70,000/yr dream job as the company I worked at decided they couldn’t keep their EMEA campus in a country that hasn’t decided how, when or even if they were going to allow foreigners in.
- I had to move to a shithole town in Nottinghamshire to live by myself in a cramped one-bedroom flat to do a job I hated for £22,000/yr.
- That company went under because we couldn’t import the network equipment into the UK because of Brexit. Most vendors weren’t bothering since there were shortages anyway, so why not just send all their stock to Germany where there’s no nasty surprises and plenty of buyers waiting.
- Ended up doing minimum-wage shift work at an Amazon warehouse and Deliveroo deliveries to survive.
- Got another, similar job on £20,000/yr.
- Not had a holiday in six years. I used to have at least two a year.
- Can’t get a CPAP machine for my apnoea because of difficulty importing them (ended up getting a friend in France to buy one for me).
- Local supermarkets still can’t get a lot of fresh fruit that they used to stock. Empty shelves common.
- My savings went from £50,000 to zero.
- Government is pissing money away on detention centres and hotels for immigrants because they refuse to cooperate with the EU.
- Government is also planning on ripping up our Human Rights (ostensibly to deal with the immigrants) and has even indicated they would like to abolish GDPR, bringing it full circle to OP’s comment.
So, yeah. Not everyone has had as bad a time as me, but everyone I know has encountered some negative fallout. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has actually benefitted, even indirectly.
So err, do you think the country has any chance of fixing stuff up, considering Poland is on track to overtake the UK at this rate, within a decade? And have perhaps some of your political ideas/values or strongly held beliefs changed at all?
My political ideology has definately changed: I now think of myself as European, rather than British. The point of the EU project is that it doesn’t fucking matter what flag you live under, or what language you talk, or which imaginary friend you worship; for all our differences were 99% the same, and want to live in safe places, eat good food, travel freely, speak out minds, work rewarding jobs, love who we want, work together to make the world better and delight in seeing others getting do the same. As a sometimes-vegeratian, coffee-loving IT worker from Manchester I have more in common with sometimes-vegetarian, coffee-loving IT workers from Mannheim, Maribor or Madrid than I do with some fat-necked millionaire power-lusting would-be dictator with whom my only common ground is a flag.
The purpose of the EU and it’s predecessors is to make war in Europe impossible. It’s that simple. Who are these people that would see that undone? Whoever they are, they call themselves British.
Lol, some would call you over remain-minded. I appreciate that you miss what you lost clearly (beyond even the wages).
As an EU citizen in blighty, I care even less about the EU than before seeing that even the wealthiest countries within the EU have regressed socially and politically.
Obviously your own issue doesn’t have much to do with EU countries’ domestic policies, you relied on UK membership of the EU for trade.
Jesus, i’m really sad to hear all that. 😢
Let’s hope the british goverment comes out soon with a good strategy to push the economy forward, (or just reverse brexit altogether).
Damn, that’s awful!
Glad the EU is cracking down on tech companies. They have done a good job fighting for consumer rights. Even improving them in nations outside the EU both by forcing companies to make global changes and by inspiring local legislation. It’s something they should be proud of.
I am
EU comes to the rescue! Again!
I know that I can uninstall first-party apps on iOS (for years now). I think Android users can, as well. It seems like, other than the monetization bit, this bill simply codifies things that already exist. Am I getting that right?
If so, they are praising themselves for saying “you have to” about things that already exist. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to prevent backsliding (I hate that word), but c’mon. And yes, the anti-monetization bit matters, it should be there, I just think this is overblown reporting.
Carrier pre-installed apps are definitely not easy to uninstall on android
Neither are Google apps. According to my Pixel YouTube is essential for my device to work.
I can disable it but not delete it.
Oh, and if I want any weather I need to give my location to all Google services.
Deleting it makes no sense with the way Android partitioning works. Disabling it prevents any of the code from running. The only way to find it again is to manually go into the settings of your phone and search for disabled apps.
I’m new to Android, why is this the case? Are these apps stored in the protected OS partition?
Yes. Android has a separate partition with a fixed size that stores all preinstalled apps. Deleting one of them wouldn’t help with giving more storage for user files, all it would do is break the ability to restore everything with a factory reset
Thank you, that makes sense but still feels unnecessary when they could install those apps with permission during setup.
Would take more internet bandwidth and make first boot slower. Would also reduce performance for thise apps, as this way they can have pre-optimized versions of every app.
GrapheneOS will do justice for ur pixel
Have you ever touched a Google phone? You CAN’T uninstalled preinstalled apps on ether of them, if you don’t root your device third party app stores suck, the law allows you to get rid of preinstalled bloat, messager interoperability is included and so on, that’s a huge law and the first against silicon valley giants with enforcment that will actually hurt them!
It’s not just that. Apple can’t self preference their own app store on iOS for example. They not just have to allow other app stores or just installing stuff, they also can’t have their own store as a default. They also have to enable people to use browsers other than Safari.
Tyrannical government overreaching and stifling innovation. This is what happens when you don’t have the second amendment and civil rights for corporations.
The innovation: So, we hasn’t implemented any of the features our rival has for 5 years, but take this one that makes you harder to switch.
Sometimes a big company has to stagnate for a while for the innovation to manifest over time. Big government regulations like this don’t give them that chance.
I don’t really understand how this is a material change from what AOSP gives you right now? Can anyone explain?
For example: AOSP has been available to EU start-ups for over a decade for free and open source but none have built alternative payment systems or email or maps or advertising services on top of it in a cohesive way before. What is this law going to allow them to do that they couldn’t before? 🤔
Stock Android on every phone sold in EU will have to offer those features. There’s a big difference for a start up between targeting AOSP and targeting all Android phones in EU. That’s exactly the point of this law: making gatekeepr devices/services equally accessible to competition.
Stock Android is AOSP. And it’s free.
I’m not sure why EU start-ups don’t just build services on top and compete like Huawei does in China or to a certain extent Amazon does with its Android variant.
You’re confusing start ups making phones with start ups offering services. If you want to sell phones yes, you can sell phones with AOSP or Lineage OS, no problem. If you’re a start up that sells Map application you’re competing with google and their app can’t be removed from phones that most people have. Most google apps can’t be removed. This is about equal access to the platform most people use, not offering alternative platform.
Ok that’s strange I can uninstall and disable Google Maps just fine in my phone right now and install an alternative Map provider of I wanted. Didn’t need legislation to do it.
There’s a huge difference between things you can do on some devices where the manufacturer decided to allow it and things required by the legislation.
Good thing you don’t need this legislation. 99% of other users will still benefit from it.
What’s the principle here? That manufactures aren’t allowed to tailor the user experience of their products? That doesn’t sound like good legislation. The equivalent would be if I wanted to bring my steering wheel from Toyota to my Audi because it promotes competition.
The regulations will encourage competition by allowing alternative payment systems, benefiting startups and consumers.
Car manufacturers must be compelled by the EU to provide pluggable and safe steering columns in cars to benefitting startups and consumers.
Obviously such a thing wouldn’t happen because it wouldn’t benefit EU car manufacturers. But let’s not talk about that, eh?
Let consumers vote with their feet. Let them choose alternatives that work for them. If there aren’t decent alternatives, build them. Why go heavy handed on legislation thinly veiled to extort money out of companies? Seriously why not build a competing payment system for the EU? The APIs are available and there’s tonnes of talented engineers in the EU. Start there. Build something better.
You clearly don’t understand the entire concept of gatekeeper companies. Read the article, it’s explained there.
Stock Android is AOSP + Google Apps, which is a part that has become so integral to Android that you wouldn’t be comfortable with actually running just AOSP anymore.
Stock Android = AOSP
Google Android = AOSP + Play Services
I totally accept that Google Android is the defacto Android. But to claim that people can’t build competing services based on AOSP is just wrong. Just take Huawei as an example. That’s all the EU needs to push. EU Android with EU specific services. They could build it now.
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First of all, phones aren’t sold with AOSP.
They’re not. But my point is that EU manufacturers / start-ups could easily make their own flavour of Android based on AOSP and launch that as a product. Why don’t they? Case in point Huawei.
I think the argument is that the monopoly is present because it’s basically pointless outside of China to launch a phone without play services. So while you can release a phone based on AOSP, it’s not going to be successful financially without the Google apps and tweaks from Play Services