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This is not Apple overruling the government. Germany is perfectly free to ban Apple products. They did not. Government / company interactions with multinatio

This is not Apple overruling the government. Germany is perfectly free to ban Apple products. They did not. Government / company interactions with multinational corporations are simple: the government makes rules, and the company is free to either operate in the locale or quit. Germany decided that they would rather have an Apple which refused to play by the proposed rules, than no Apple at all, so they figured out new rules.

chimprich 7y ago
> This is not Apple overruling the government. Germany is perfectly free to ban Apple products. They did not. That makes no sense. Maybe, in theory, if you had five years to play with, Germany could move towards restricting Apple products. In practice the window of opportunity to affect the course of this epidemic using technology is weeks or months. That restricts your options to using existing infrastructure; realistically that means working with Apple or Google. Germany could ban Apple and Google products, but that would leave them nothing to work with. This is going to raise questions about national security and sovereignty going forward. I suspect this will be a subject of controversy after the pandemic dies down.
- chopin 7y ago
  Hopefully this will be a conversation about how a government uses a crisis to expand its surveillance powers.
- BillyTheKing 7y ago
  as mentioned above, I think the headline really is a little misleading here... there was a ton of backlash against using a centralised system for this contact-tracing app from the opposition, privacy lobbies, the CCC, universities, researchers, programmers that worked on it, etc. and on top of all of that also from Apple (though I doubt they would've put up much of an opposition if the EU had pushed their own solution and forced apple to adopt it - can you imagine the backlash apple would've faced if they denied co-operation for such an app during a pandemic, _had_ that app been the popular app of choice in the EU? It wasn't, however). The way this is reported/seen in Germany is mostly that the government realised it would be difficult for an app to achieve wide-spread adoption without the support of privacy-advocates. For better or worse, those privacy concerns are usually taken fairly seriously!

chimprich 7y ago

> This is not Apple overruling the government. Germany is perfectly free to ban Apple products. They did not. That makes no sense. Maybe, in theory, if you had five years to play with, Germany could move towards restricting Apple products. In practice the window of opportunity to affect the course of this epidemic using technology is weeks or months. That restricts your options to using existing infrastructure; realistically that means working with Apple or Google. Germany could ban Apple and Google products, but that would leave them nothing to work with. This is going to raise questions about national security and sovereignty going forward. I suspect this will be a subject of controversy after the pandemic dies down.

chopin 7y ago
Hopefully this will be a conversation about how a government uses a crisis to expand its surveillance powers.
BillyTheKing 7y ago
as mentioned above, I think the headline really is a little misleading here... there was a ton of backlash against using a centralised system for this contact-tracing app from the opposition, privacy lobbies, the CCC, universities, researchers, programmers that worked on it, etc. and on top of all of that also from Apple (though I doubt they would've put up much of an opposition if the EU had pushed their own solution and forced apple to adopt it - can you imagine the backlash apple would've faced if they denied co-operation for such an app during a pandemic, _had_ that app been the popular app of choice in the EU? It wasn't, however). The way this is reported/seen in Germany is mostly that the government realised it would be difficult for an app to achieve wide-spread adoption without the support of privacy-advocates. For better or worse, those privacy concerns are usually taken fairly seriously!