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/
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Yeah, I totally agree. Lots of people don’t seem to understand centralized authoritarian control is the big evil, even if it reinforces your personal politics (for now).
The EU is good when they’re doing good things, and bad when they’re doing bad things. Someone has to reign in international corporations and their anti-consumer anti-planet bullshit.
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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?
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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.
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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
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App Store itself directs those people to 3rd parties in those cases.
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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.
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Yeah, I see why you were being called a bootlicker.
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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.
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This is dumb
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The EU must be less of a state and more like EFTA
It’s still amused by the whole USB-C push to “Reduce eWaste”.
By legislating that everyone should use USB-C, they generated a lot of eWaste in the form of legacy USB-A, B, micro, lightning, etc, as well as requiring more cables in the form of USB-C to USB-A, B, micro, lightning, etc. cables in the transition phase.
The various different types of USB-C cables (power only, data only, Thunderbolt 4, etc) as well as the glut of different incompatible USB-C interfaces has made things much worse.
It reminds me of the XKCD comic about introducing new standards to reduce the number of standards.