As its the EU and regulation, its time to trott out your hobby horse.
So let me trot out mine: regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions.
the Online safety act is a good example of a bad law, which is enforced badly. The first big test (X producing industrial quantities of minors engaging in sexual activity) was failed. Had a small company produced a service that did they same thing, they would have been fined, servers ceased and owners thrown in jail. X got a letter saying they should stop.
An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
Old school methods like what McDonald's use, literally allow the customer to see in to the kitchen are very effective.
Not always ideal for every type establishment but I've seen high end Indian restaurants even do it by having the POS at the back where you can see the kitchen when paying which keeps the noise separate for the desired quiet atmosphere of a fine dining restaurant
I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.
SOrry, yes I should point out its not perfect. The scores on the doors website is also a partial remedy for this. But I should concede that no solution is perfect, and you still need to allow for the evolution of fraudsters.
> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though
Me neither, The pre-existing ways are independent lab testing ( euro-ncap for cars, or ifixit) or the "you have to pay for testing" like for large white goods. None of those work if they are not enforced though....
> An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
> Another good example is NCAP ratings.
Worth noting that NCAP and Scores on the Doors are not regulators. NCAP is an industry body; SotDs is run by TripAdvisor.
I am unfamiliar with these matters and I am also unsure what specifically you are referring to.
But in general, if big companies get away with wrongdoings by receiving a gentle slap on their fingers, figuratively speaking, it will, in my opinion, lead to no change whatsoever.
Because if there are no material consequences for wrongdoings, they probably would not care. And there are very few kinds of actually material consequences for big companies. One of them being a really hefty fine.
Sadly that mess had a political component, any attempt to regulate US big tech results in howls from over the Atlantic.
Frankly, I'd prefer it if we just let them howl and said fuck it more but it's probably a good job I'm not making those decisions (and in honesty the picture is complex for companies that size/the politics).
Ironically the fact that the howls need to come from the other side of the Atlantic, rather than having any domestically, should tell anyone all they need to know about the situation.
Don't disagree but the results are impossible to know from the US side, politicians have to balance everything and decide whether it's worth the political capital.
Not like it's the only issue in US/UK relations these days either.
> Ironically the fact that the howls need to come from the other side of the Atlantic, rather than having any domestically, should tell anyone all they need to know about the situation.
Europeans by and large don't care about American companies these days. They use American software products because frequently there are no alternatives. And most of the news about them are negative.
From the article, it seems more about chinese brands, no?
> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.
> But even for products that are technically compliant, the listed weblink still rarely offers a direct path to parts prices. For major brands such as Apple and Samsung, it can take some clicking around before you find what you need, Right to Repair says.
Yes, Twitter frontpage should include a little counter with how much child exploitation it has facilitated today.
I don't think there's a single politician in Bruxelles that wouldn't love to come down hard on X. There is no love for Elon in those circles anymore. The problem is that he's attached himself to international politics through his daddy. Trump has threatened the EU with strict sanctions if they levy any sort of proportional fine to US tech companies.
The problem is no longer capitalist liberalism. The new challenge is American Fascism.
Minors were involved. People were responding to pictures of minors and prompting Grok to sexualize them. People were uploading their own photos of real minors and asking Grok to make modifications to them.
I understand your view point and are somewhat sympathetic.
However for point one, the samples I saw were a picture of a minor posted by a minor in a normal situation. Someone would say @grok show me her in a bikini.
for point 2, this is not born out by the examples that I saw.
The bigger point here is that under UK law, there is little distinction between "real" and "fake". Any depiction of a minor engaged in sexual activities is illegal. This was to get round the "oh its photoshoped" defence. In the USA is different, but I have no experience on that point.
The only reason why I know is because a member of staff at a previous company was found to be using his workstation to store and distribute anime shit that depicted this stuff, and the company legal advice was "oh wow you are totally fucked." It was a huge faff to deal with and posed huge risks to everyone involved.
Social media is already full of hentai art of that sort and that isn't a problem to most countries, so a little thought leads to the obvious point that your basic assumptions are incorrect.
Minors were involved and people were generating sexually charged images ("donut glaze" etc). This is why other countries, like South Korea, also went after X under deepfake related regulations.
I guess when discussing the reasons for the law failing to bring about the intended changes, we only need to agree on that the law did not intend to make this distinction (though it definitely could have made them, even before LLM this was a deliberate choice) - not whether doing so would have been advisable.
Enforcement can be better, but I'm gonna give grace given how recently it was imposed. It's easy to point at extreme levels of enforcement being a key part of any regulation, but I have seen the breadth of the EU's scope and what needs to be balanced. Quite often I find that nonaction against compliance violations falls into the following:
- Lack of resources
- Lack of real consumer impact
- Awaiting legislation meant to clarify or strengthen impact of enforcement.
The article to me doesn't offer enough to justify any shout of doing anything different at the moment, rather it's just that they failed an audit. If they failed an audit and coupled this to swaths of consumer complaints, sure, but every EU member has a clear agency for consumer complaint, and I don't buy it that it is hard for consumers to report violations, it is far more likely in this case that they just don't care for the violations this particular group cares more about (like the links to Temu. I suspect a consumer doesn't care if it actually works still in practice, but we'd need surveys to confirm).
Consumer-replaceable batteries will be one area that WILL be a hot issue for consumers, so I would bet we will see much stronger reaction once that rule comes into effect.
What I expect from this is rather that at least a few producers get more repair friendly so I as consumer have the choice again. (Writing this on my first phone without easily changeable battery, I've tried for very long)
So I as my families tech guru can give the right signals to my family and in a few years we see the actual change happen. Slowly but steadily
Companies don't really care about rules per se. They care about their risk appetite, and whether the consequences of their actions create risk above that appetite level.
The simple calculus is: will it cost me more to comply, or more to ignore? If a company chooses the more costly option, they are betraying their shareholders and being managed poorly.
If you do not fine early and often, you are almost mandating that companies ignore the legislation. If this continues for several years, then you almost make it impossible to turn around later and fine, as businesses will want to know what's changed now. You will create an impression of uncertainty and instability, which is the last thing businesses want, and the last thing you want to do to encourage investment.
If you just set and enforce the rules from the start, then everyone can relax, do the right thing and be happy about it. It's funny how rarely this actually seems to happen.
If it does not happen quickly, then the result might end up similar to data privacy topics.
If you can afford to keep fines in litigation/appeals/formal-defect limbo for a sufficient number of years, you can grow out of even once-threatening fines and delay compliance until the law that you finally bow down to is so old that its signs of old age will in the meantime become popular arguments for undermining or retracting it.
Contrary to popular belief, the EU is not very fast when it comes to enforcement on requirements like these. We already saw this with the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR: those scary hundreds-of-millions-of-euros fines are only handed out after ongoing and deliberate violation, where you've already received plenty of warnings and smaller fines.
18% compliance after one year with zero enforcement is not great, but it's already a massive increase over the near-zero repairable products we had only a few years ago. On top of that it is 18% of models, so there's a decent chance that a huge chunk of the noncompliant ones are obscure brands with near-zero sales: a handful of models by Apple and Samsung already add up to over 60% market share. And the report was literally written by iFixit, so there's a rather clear commercial incentive to underrepresent it and push for the strongest enforcement possible.
You can see the GDPR stats on https://www.enforcementtracker.com/statistics (scroll to “Enforcement over time” and click on “Total €”). 2018–2020 was effectively nothing compared to later.
It's going to be cool to get user-replaceable batteries back in new phone releases.
Depending how it goes I can see myself keeping a spare instead of a powerbank
The whole discussion on what the EU is doing has devolved into this idea that everyone will be forced to offer a backplate that pops out and a battery you can remove with your fingers.
The directive is far more complicated, and you will not see that at all.
The regulation doesn't mean batteries have to be made swappable with just bare hands. Common tools and some simple, easily undoable gluing is still acceptable. It gets a battery replacement from a process that risks breaking glass parts, overheating components etc.. to something that can be done by a moderately skilled person with a moderately well stocked toolbox in an afternoon.
I'll never forget the feeling when you get an old phone, replace the battery and it's like brand new again. People no longer need to replace their phone every year anymore so being able to just replace the screen and battery makes the device practically brand new.
Sure, but so far I've replaced my phone screen once and the battery never, I suppose both would be equally easy though. Why is heating a big issue but removing screws not? Shouldn't we mandate user-replaceable screens too? Soon you'll end up regulating all phones to be modular.
Spare battery: remove empty battery, switch battery, you are back to 100%
Powerbank: mess with cables, keep phone plugged until it's charged and wait
If there is a market for spare batteries, there might be a market for external battery chargers as well > swap battery in the morning instead of charging, place empty battery on charger, repeat the next day
Spare batteries are a nightmare to handle. Far too easy to bend or have something short-circuit the pads, and you have to shut down and restart your phone.
However, what is needed desperately is the ability to quickly change a degraded battery.
Spare batteries that are designed as internal batteries not to be easily swappable, yes.
Look at DSLR cameras: take out in 1 second, put in in 1 second, physically robust.
We absolutely can have the best of both worlds. We just need to align the smartphone manufacturers to user serviceability and right to repair… even if they go kicking and screaming since they decided their bottom line is most important.
I appreciate the intent to hold large corporations accountable, but I've lost faith in the EU being competent at doing so. Not as if I see anyone doing it better, but at least others aren't doing it so poorly.
I really don't get the big deal with GDRP. Consider what you are storing and why you are storing. Decide if those things align. If they do not, well don't implement that in first place. And I suppose LLMs are perfect for the boiler plate documentation so not big effort there either.
Somethings are big more challenging like getting the data for customer when asking or deleting it when reasonable. But as user I also like at least having that option. It is least any business can do.
GDPR is reasonable, maybe too weak regulation of big businesses with lots of data.
The problem is that it applies to small organisations, even non-profits, that do not trade that information which is proportionately a much bigger burden. Real examples of organisations I have come across who have to comply with GDPR include a local community theatre, a parish church etc. They are keep fairly simple information, and not exchanging it with anyone, but they still have to put effort into ensuring compliance. They are pretty good and ethical anyway - the theatre recently impressed me when I found out that if you give them medical information in case of emergency they put it in a sealed envelope and no one opens it unless there is an actually emergency that requires it (i.e. you keel over there!).
> Real examples of organisations I have come across who have to comply with GDPR include a local community theatre, a parish church etc. They are keep fairly simple information, and not exchanging it with anyone, but they still have to put effort into ensuring compliance.
Yeah, and that is precisely where you want something like the GDPR to be as well!
Large corporations are one thing, they have compliance departments, but so, so many local organizations have gotten hacked or data exfiltrated because "why do software and hardware updates when everything is working" or due to incompetence ("cc all"). GDPR finally gave the younger crowd some leverage to get the old guard to do things at least somewhat decently.
Why would they? The worst thing that can realistically happen is a $1-$5 billion fine a few years from now, which they only need to pay a few years after that when they have exhausted their legal remedies.
That’s easy to calculate with, and almost certainly cheaper than compliance.
I think with many of the recent regulations, they could verify and find many of the egregious cases to be violating today.
The EU is just extremely worried about US tariffs and retracting support to Ukraine.
IMO they should just bite the bullet and do what they need to do. In a world of bullies those that are willing to show their teeth win. But instead we have a lot of politicians without a spine.
A huge part of that was fearmongering by people selling compliance consultancy services and people trying to find loopholes allowing them to keep abusing their users' data. For a lot of companies it really wasn't that big of a deal in practice.
So let me trot out mine: regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions.
the Online safety act is a good example of a bad law, which is enforced badly. The first big test (X producing industrial quantities of minors engaging in sexual activity) was failed. Had a small company produced a service that did they same thing, they would have been fined, servers ceased and owners thrown in jail. X got a letter saying they should stop.
An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
Another good example is NCAP ratings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SO8KcfhJmc
Old school methods like what McDonald's use, literally allow the customer to see in to the kitchen are very effective.
Not always ideal for every type establishment but I've seen high end Indian restaurants even do it by having the POS at the back where you can see the kitchen when paying which keeps the noise separate for the desired quiet atmosphere of a fine dining restaurant
I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.
> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though
Me neither, The pre-existing ways are independent lab testing ( euro-ncap for cars, or ifixit) or the "you have to pay for testing" like for large white goods. None of those work if they are not enforced though....
> Another good example is NCAP ratings.
Worth noting that NCAP and Scores on the Doors are not regulators. NCAP is an industry body; SotDs is run by TripAdvisor.
I am unfamiliar with these matters and I am also unsure what specifically you are referring to.
But in general, if big companies get away with wrongdoings by receiving a gentle slap on their fingers, figuratively speaking, it will, in my opinion, lead to no change whatsoever.
Because if there are no material consequences for wrongdoings, they probably would not care. And there are very few kinds of actually material consequences for big companies. One of them being a really hefty fine.
Frankly, I'd prefer it if we just let them howl and said fuck it more but it's probably a good job I'm not making those decisions (and in honesty the picture is complex for companies that size/the politics).
Not like it's the only issue in US/UK relations these days either.
That's the situation whether we like it or not.
Europeans by and large don't care about American companies these days. They use American software products because frequently there are no alternatives. And most of the news about them are negative.
> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.
> But even for products that are technically compliant, the listed weblink still rarely offers a direct path to parts prices. For major brands such as Apple and Samsung, it can take some clicking around before you find what you need, Right to Repair says.
I don't think there's a single politician in Bruxelles that wouldn't love to come down hard on X. There is no love for Elon in those circles anymore. The problem is that he's attached himself to international politics through his daddy. Trump has threatened the EU with strict sanctions if they levy any sort of proportional fine to US tech companies.
The problem is no longer capitalist liberalism. The new challenge is American Fascism.
However for point one, the samples I saw were a picture of a minor posted by a minor in a normal situation. Someone would say @grok show me her in a bikini.
for point 2, this is not born out by the examples that I saw.
The bigger point here is that under UK law, there is little distinction between "real" and "fake". Any depiction of a minor engaged in sexual activities is illegal. This was to get round the "oh its photoshoped" defence. In the USA is different, but I have no experience on that point.
The only reason why I know is because a member of staff at a previous company was found to be using his workstation to store and distribute anime shit that depicted this stuff, and the company legal advice was "oh wow you are totally fucked." It was a huge faff to deal with and posed huge risks to everyone involved.
(Depending on your local jurisdiction. But GP said "Online Safety Act" so I'm making an assumption).
Minors were involved and people were generating sexually charged images ("donut glaze" etc). This is why other countries, like South Korea, also went after X under deepfake related regulations.
- Lack of resources
- Lack of real consumer impact
- Awaiting legislation meant to clarify or strengthen impact of enforcement.
The article to me doesn't offer enough to justify any shout of doing anything different at the moment, rather it's just that they failed an audit. If they failed an audit and coupled this to swaths of consumer complaints, sure, but every EU member has a clear agency for consumer complaint, and I don't buy it that it is hard for consumers to report violations, it is far more likely in this case that they just don't care for the violations this particular group cares more about (like the links to Temu. I suspect a consumer doesn't care if it actually works still in practice, but we'd need surveys to confirm).
Consumer-replaceable batteries will be one area that WILL be a hot issue for consumers, so I would bet we will see much stronger reaction once that rule comes into effect.
What I expect from this is rather that at least a few producers get more repair friendly so I as consumer have the choice again. (Writing this on my first phone without easily changeable battery, I've tried for very long)
So I as my families tech guru can give the right signals to my family and in a few years we see the actual change happen. Slowly but steadily
The simple calculus is: will it cost me more to comply, or more to ignore? If a company chooses the more costly option, they are betraying their shareholders and being managed poorly.
If you do not fine early and often, you are almost mandating that companies ignore the legislation. If this continues for several years, then you almost make it impossible to turn around later and fine, as businesses will want to know what's changed now. You will create an impression of uncertainty and instability, which is the last thing businesses want, and the last thing you want to do to encourage investment.
If you just set and enforce the rules from the start, then everyone can relax, do the right thing and be happy about it. It's funny how rarely this actually seems to happen.
If you can afford to keep fines in litigation/appeals/formal-defect limbo for a sufficient number of years, you can grow out of even once-threatening fines and delay compliance until the law that you finally bow down to is so old that its signs of old age will in the meantime become popular arguments for undermining or retracting it.
18% compliance after one year with zero enforcement is not great, but it's already a massive increase over the near-zero repairable products we had only a few years ago. On top of that it is 18% of models, so there's a decent chance that a huge chunk of the noncompliant ones are obscure brands with near-zero sales: a handful of models by Apple and Samsung already add up to over 60% market share. And the report was literally written by iFixit, so there's a rather clear commercial incentive to underrepresent it and push for the strongest enforcement possible.
Aside from FairPhone no one offers that
The directive is far more complicated, and you will not see that at all.
Spare battery: ???
However when your battery is old, and drains fast, it's really nice to be able to order a new one and easily change it by removing 4 screws.
Not having to perform surgery on your phone, heating it to remove glue, etc.
If there is a market for spare batteries, there might be a market for external battery chargers as well > swap battery in the morning instead of charging, place empty battery on charger, repeat the next day
However, what is needed desperately is the ability to quickly change a degraded battery.
Look at DSLR cameras: take out in 1 second, put in in 1 second, physically robust.
We absolutely can have the best of both worlds. We just need to align the smartphone manufacturers to user serviceability and right to repair… even if they go kicking and screaming since they decided their bottom line is most important.
Politicians have a tendency to think that passing legislation fixes problems, where is its only the start of the process.
Being in favour of the GDPR will bring out downvotes and FUD from the people whose very salaries are dependent on invading your privacy.
Somethings are big more challenging like getting the data for customer when asking or deleting it when reasonable. But as user I also like at least having that option. It is least any business can do.
The problem is that it applies to small organisations, even non-profits, that do not trade that information which is proportionately a much bigger burden. Real examples of organisations I have come across who have to comply with GDPR include a local community theatre, a parish church etc. They are keep fairly simple information, and not exchanging it with anyone, but they still have to put effort into ensuring compliance. They are pretty good and ethical anyway - the theatre recently impressed me when I found out that if you give them medical information in case of emergency they put it in a sealed envelope and no one opens it unless there is an actually emergency that requires it (i.e. you keel over there!).
Yeah, and that is precisely where you want something like the GDPR to be as well!
Large corporations are one thing, they have compliance departments, but so, so many local organizations have gotten hacked or data exfiltrated because "why do software and hardware updates when everything is working" or due to incompetence ("cc all"). GDPR finally gave the younger crowd some leverage to get the old guard to do things at least somewhat decently.
That’s easy to calculate with, and almost certainly cheaper than compliance.
The EU is just extremely worried about US tariffs and retracting support to Ukraine.
IMO they should just bite the bullet and do what they need to do. In a world of bullies those that are willing to show their teeth win. But instead we have a lot of politicians without a spine.