The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

Not a joke. I'm aware of that feature, and that's why I said it. No idea about false positives.

No, it does not. Maybe you're thinking of Pixel Watch?

Let me know when all this heart rate monitoring can do loss-of-pulse detection and call emergency services if I have a heart attack. That's worth paying for. Having slightly more frequent heart rate monitoring? Don't care. Not even a little.

Here's the flaw in your logic. The vast majority of their customers WANT to turn this s**t off. But they put up with it up to a point or they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people who are engagement junkies who eat it up and therefore drive up ad impressions. They could lose 90% of their users, and if the other 10% increase their usage 10x, they're still ahead...

... but while the company may be ahead in that situation, society is still harmed by the other 90% not having access to a usable service. And of course, not all of those 90% will jump ship. Many will suffer silently while being harassed relentlessly by garbage posts by creators that they think you'll "enjoy".

I wholeheartedly agree that while algorithmic feeds are fine, there MUST be an opt out, and it cannot be like Facebook's "Most Recent" sort that disappears on its own every week or so. No matter how many times you tell them what they want, they shovel whatever s**t they want. It has reached the point where I almost never go on there anymore, because instead of being able to interact with the contents from my friends and groups that I follow, I'm constantly getting bombarded with mostly garbage posts and ads, with less than a 1:10 signal-to-noise ratio.

Please force them to do this, and to all the other governments of the world, please do likewise.

Patents. And AI can't be the inventor for patents, so by doing this, they're potentially dropping a huge land mine on patentability of genetics research. It's kind of awesome, at least from an "our genes are not for sale" perspective. :-D

It appears that you will not cite where I said any of that. Is that because you can't find it or that you are lying?

I did not "INSIST" on anything. You are lying. I said is that WHATEVER I type into my calendar should be private that AI cannot not read. It could be "Out". It could be "Holiday". It could be "Doctor's Appointment". I don't know what your calendar looks like but "Out" for every single block of time makes it very difficult to plan. You are inventing things.

Dear Lord, your comprehension is poor: I said: "In the case of surgery, you mean besides to remind people I work with that I'm having surgery so I will be out for X number of days? IF I have a surgery, I block the days I will need for recovery. I TELL my team members WHY I am out. I COULD put it in the calendar as "Surgery" or "Playing Video Games" It doesn't matter. No one should see WHY. Your first response is that I could be robbed. You keep inventing scenarios INSTEAD OF FUCKING READING.

Do you even work in an office with people? Every response of yours relies on an unwillingness to recognize other people exist.

That is a lie. I said nothing of the sort. Please cite where I did. I have repeatedly said the exact opposite. REPEATEDLY. What you are saying is you could not bother to FUCKING READ.

HOW FUCKING DENSE ARE YOU? When you let AI program things, it misses details. Every current calendar out there has privacy settings. Privacy settings is one of the many things that I expect AI to miss when coding a calendar app.

NO ONE FUCKING SAID THAT. Why do you keep making up shit? No one is "forced" into anything.

WHAT PARTING OF FUCKING PRIVACTY SETTINGS DO YOU STILL NOT UNDERSTAND. PRIVACY SETTINGS.

FUCKING PRIVACY SETTINGS. YOU STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT PRIVACY SETTINGS ARE.

Wow you really don't have any clue what you are talking about. I have never said that. NEVER. In fact I said very early the EXACT OPPOSITE: "They are not supposed to be visible which is the point you are missing." My point AGAIN is whether this calendar app correctly secured such private information. I don't know but given the track record of AI generated code, security might be entirely missing or superficial.

You've made it perfectly clear everyone is stupid for not doing things your way.

Again no one should be able to read it. For a second there, I thought you were smart enough to understand that but apparently not.

The fact that you don't understand how fundamentals of privacy where one user can see information and another cannot.

Again everyone should do everything your way regardless of things like privacy settings.

It is not readable. Why do you have so much trouble understanding this?

Again it is not readable. Your lack of understanding basics of security is troubling.

So in summary, you understand that two different users should see two different things. But that should not be allowed because you do thing differently. Everyone must do it the way you do it. So we are back to the main problem: Your lack of seeing another person's perspective. I should just type in "Unavailable" for every time I am off. No one should type in the reason they are out so they can keep track of why they were out or plan why they will be out.

Let me explain this slowly to you as you do not seem to understand. In my calendar I have listed the exact reason why I am not available. It could be "Surgery" It could be "Playing video games". It could be "Out" NO ONE SHOULD SEE WHY I AM UNAVAILABLE BUT ME. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Do you even work an office? Everyone I work with has the same setting. I don't know WHY they are out. They know.

I should see the reason, not you. Are you so dense you do not understand that two users should see two different things DUE TO SECURITY? It should not matter to you why I am out. It only matters to me.

WTF are you talking about? If I have a medical procedure, it does not necessarily mean I am in the hospital. It means I am not available for work. I could be home the entire time after the surgery.

I would think someone in Europe would understand privacy, but alas no.

Again you seem not to be able to see someone else's perspective. Do you even work in an office? Every calendar app I use shows "Unavailable" to you but shows me WHATEVER REASON I typed in to keep track of why I was out.

It's also at least *mostly* academic. If Apple charges only for actual clicks, rather than impressions, then the cost to the advertiser is arguably the same whether the targeting is good or not. The only difference is the cost to Apple itself.

I would assume the main signal that Apple has is whether the user already has the app installed and/or has previously tried the app and deleted it. And while I understand why app developers would *like* to be able to know every app you have installed so that they can't show ads for it, Apple stopped letting them do that a long time ago for good reason. It's a *huge* privacy impact.

If Apple could come up with a privacy-protecting way to help app developers filter ads that are irrelevant based on installations and other factors without revealing to the app developer what exact apps are installed, I think a lot of users would consider that to be a win, because the ads we endure would at least be slightly less absurd.

But there is no rational universe in which someone can reasonably argue that it is anticompetitive to use the fact that you know that you already sold someone a product to avoid telling them to buy that product, or at least not without arguing that the existence of a single store is itself anticompetitive (which it is, but that's an orthogonal problem).

Well, yeah, but that's ads running in an entirely closed ecosystem. I guess in a silly way, you could argue that in-app ads with tracking disabled are less effective, and App Store ads provide another way to get eyes on apps, so it kind of competes, but that's like saying that Special Rollback Deal signs inside an individual Walmart store compete with Google AdSense. It's technically correct, but not particularly interesting.

Put another way, I can't imagine that any significant number of people who, prior to the do-not-track rules, used to think that in-app ads were targeted well enough are suddenly thinking that targeting is bad because of those do-not-track restrictions. In-app ads are all too horribly targeted across the board for such a thing to be plausible. And the increase in the number of people choosing to use their ad dollars for App Store category promotion over in-app advertising because of those tracking rules is probably even smaller, if it is even nonzero.

I'm not saying that no judge could possibly find that such claims have merit, because there's always somebody who doesn't understand things who will rule in your favor if you venue shop hard enough, but I am saying that IMO, the claims have little to no merit, at least on the surface, and that Apple's DNT rules A. are likely required by law for European compliance anyway and B. have a legitimate public interest that massively overshadows any mostly hypothetical and negligibly sized anticompetitive impact.

Since when does Apple have an advertising ecosystem? I mean, I know there was that brief iAd disaster, but that's been dead for a decade now.

Is competing with the absence of something a problem from an antitrust perspective? If so, explain why, and how intrusive advertising benefits users, rather than app developers.

I'm with Apple on this one. Squarely.