Germany Forces Apple To Let Other Mobile Wallet Services Use iPhone's NFC Chip 56
A new German law passed yesterday requires Apple to allow other mobile payments services access to the iPhone's NFC chip for payments to allow them to fully compete with Apple Pay. 9to5Mac reports: Apple initially completely locked down the NFC chip so that it could be used only by Apple Pay. It later allowed some third-party apps to use the chip but has always refused to do so for other mobile payment apps. Reuters reports that the law doesn't name Apple specifically, but would apply to the tech giant. The piece somewhat confusingly refers to access to the NFC chip by third-party payment apps as Apple Pay.
"A German parliamentary committee unexpectedly voted in a late-night session on Wednesday to force the tech giant to open up Apple Pay to rival providers in Germany," reports Reuters. "This came in the form of an amendment to an anti-money laundering law that was adopted late on Thursday by the full parliament and is set to come into effect early next year. The legislation, which did not name Apple specifically, will force operators of electronic money infrastructure to offer access to rivals for a reasonable fee." Apple says that the change would be harmful: "We are surprised at how suddenly this legislation was introduced. We fear that the draft law could be harmful to user friendliness, data protection and the security of financial information."
"A German parliamentary committee unexpectedly voted in a late-night session on Wednesday to force the tech giant to open up Apple Pay to rival providers in Germany," reports Reuters. "This came in the form of an amendment to an anti-money laundering law that was adopted late on Thursday by the full parliament and is set to come into effect early next year. The legislation, which did not name Apple specifically, will force operators of electronic money infrastructure to offer access to rivals for a reasonable fee." Apple says that the change would be harmful: "We are surprised at how suddenly this legislation was introduced. We fear that the draft law could be harmful to user friendliness, data protection and the security of financial information."
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Good letting Apple leverage their monopoly power to get a cut of so many sales while forcing the costs on non Apple users is unjust.
It's bad enough credit card companies are making gains in Europe, don't need more leeches.
Re: Good (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If they don't want you to be allowed to use your phone as you wish, perhaps they should stop selling them.
Or you could exercise the slightest bit of self control and just not purchase their products.
But no, your inability to control yourself is completely worth preventing everyone else who does have self control from making their own choices.
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Who exactly is prevented from making their own choices under this law?
Re: Good (Score:3)
Re: Good (Score:2)
Re: Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Good (Score:2)
Germany has immigration laws, and enforces them quite sensibly
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Whoops, suddenly don't apply?
Why? They have immigration laws and enforce them just fine.
How is it that laws apply in one situation and then not another?
Slashdot poster ignorance mostly.
Awkward...
I'll say!
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If Apple did not like their legal system, trade system, etc etc etc they should have stayed out of those countries.
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Apple loves Germany. 4th largest economy in the world, largest in Europe. They aren't going to pull out over this, although they might try to make the feature only available in Germany.
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Re: Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. It's their system.
False. It's my phone. That would be like buying a basketball from Wilson only to find out they won't allow me to bounce it in my own driveway.
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Just a government telling a private organization what to do.
Nope. It's a government telling a private organization what not to do, something that is expressly required unless you want your country to fall under corporate law.
Not surprising coming from Germany. They have a tendency of swinging wildly to the left
... to make that claim about the German government just shows that you have zero clue at all. The German government is majority centre-right, with the last election showing a major swing to extreme right.
Get a fucking clue.
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Re: Good (Score:1)
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Good letting Apple leverage their monopoly power to get a cut of so many sales while forcing the costs on non Apple users is unjust.
It's bad enough credit card companies are making gains in Europe, don't need more leeches.
A clickbait /. Headline? I am shocked, shocked! What the headline fails to mention is that the law does not target Apple; it requires any mobile payment provider to provide access for a reasonable fee. Apple and others will simply charge for the access and potentially collect a wealth of valuable use data to target ads.
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In Europe language like "reasonable fee" generally means "at cost". Since it's free on Android, just pay for a standard app developer licence, I can't see Apple being able to charge much more than that.
They could MITM attack the NFC conversation I guess in order to harvest data, but again being Europe they would need to clearly tell the user they are doing that and get their affirmative opt-in consent, and if the user declined they couldn't deny access to the NFC hardware because personal-data-for-access is
Re:...and if Apple was German... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they need MAGGA hats...Make All Germany Great Again.
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Whataboutism is a propaganda technique first used by the Soviet Union, in its dealings with the Western world.[1] When Cold War criticisms were levelled at the Soviet Union, the response would be "What about..." followed by the naming of an event in the Western world.[2][3] It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy),[4] a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly r
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The old Soviet whataboutism- classical whataboutism (Trump and his congressional supports current profession) is to draw false moral equivalencies.
This is more like someone pointing out that you're the pot, and you're literally calling the kettle black.
They're not wrong. You, I think, are.
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If Apple was German you can bet your ass this legislation would never have been passed.
Of course not, because German companies don't behave in anti-consumer fashion. Well actually yes they do and they get slapped regularly for it, you just don't hear about it in your echo-chamber.
Some "allies"
Allies of whom? We're getting to the stage where the entire world is beginning to think the United States (who just let their "allies" in Northern Syria get actively slaughtered) can go fuck itself.
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Re: Waiting for all the apple hypocrites (Score:1)
The NFC chip is not a security component
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Practical uses of NFC (Score:3)
I know people close to me with type 1 diabetes (1)
One of the most popular brand of continuous glucose monitoring system (Freestyle) uses NFC to transmit its data.
In order to avoid transport around a dedicated reader (sized like an old school dumbphone) to fetch an display the data:
- Android smartphone users: just have to install an app, and there are even opensource ones.
- Apple smartphone users: for a long time they didn't have any alternative to the dedicated reader, until the manufacturer managed to conv
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In the UK people from the EU who are living here have been made to register so they can stay after Brexit. If they have an Android phone they can just use an app and NFC to check their passport. If they have an Apple phone they can't, so the government says borrow and Android one.
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NFC isn't a security component. The security has and always will be the job of the software backend, and this is no different for your phone's NFC chip than it is for a card reader.
And to be honest, I trust my bank's very simple single purpose app for NFC payments far more with security than I trust Apple's complicated multi-card, multi-middlemen Apple play system. And if I didn't I would still use my bank's app since I have legal recourse against my bank if something goes wrong with it.
Americans should pra
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Correct, the NFC protocol driver is not a security component. However, what drives it could be - since things like Apple Pay use the secure enclave which holds certain credentials secretly away from the main OS. This allows for protection of things like security keys and secrets from bugs in the main OS, and the secure enclave ru
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Maybe there are some legitimate reasons for not doing this, but I don't think this is one of them.
Re: Europe: no thank you. (Score:2)
Have you forgotten the whole âoelet them pick the browser and ensure everyone has an equal shotâ fiasco?
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This isn't "pick a browser". This is "stop preventing other browsers from installing". I highly suggest if you are going to draw comparisons that you first have a clue about what it is being compared.
Re: Europe: no thank you. (Score:2)
Yeah. Try looking down the road some.
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Pick one. (Score:3)
We are surprised at how suddenly this legislation was introduced. We fear that the draft law could be harmful to user friendliness, data protection and the security of financial information.
On of these two statements is true. Guess which?
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We are surprised at how suddenly this legislation was introduced. We fear that the draft law could be harmful to user friendliness, data protection and the security of financial information.
On of these two statements is true. Guess which?
Both of them. When you give morons (most app developers) access to something that can affect your financial data, bad things can and often do happen (see Equifax). I work for a company that does a lot of work with mobile encryption, and the worst job candidates I see always come from banks. They don't know the difference between a hash and encryption. To suggest that they're going to keep your data safe is folly.
Apple generally doesn't expose APIs that haven't been hardened against attack.
Disable? (Score:2)
IMessages (Score:2)
What about iMessages? iMessages is the biggest monopoly thing that keeps people stuck with Apple though they want out.
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Re: IMessages (Score:1)