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Above a desk somewhere at Apple HQ someone has probably pasted the slogan, “Another week, another lawsuit,” and this week seems no different as the EU is targeting Apple Pay, or to be more specific, how Apple constrains use of the NFC chip inside iPhones.

What’s the claim?

The second charge in Europe this year, EU antitrust regulators have alleged that Apple restricts competitors by denying access to the NFC (Near-Field Communications) technology it uses in its mobile wallet.

Apple has been sent a statement of objections in which regulators detailed how it has abused its dominance position in markets for mobile wallets on iOS in contravention of Article 102 of the TFEU.

Apple Pay has access to the NFC Input APIs, which the company does not make available to third-party payment firms. However, other platforms do permit third parties to access NFC tech to make such payments.

The EU statement says it “does not take issue with the online restrictions nor the alleged refusals of access to Apple Pay for specific products of rivals that the Commission announced that it had concerns when it opened the in-depth investigation into Apple’s practices.”

Both the latter matters were part of the investigation when it began in 2020, allegedly in response to complaints raised by PayPal.

The case is different from the proposals within the EU Digital Markets Act, which will also affect Apple’s business. Apple is facing scrutiny and regulation in most of its major markets, including the UK, US, Korea, Europe, Japa,n and elsewhere.

What the EU says

“In our Statement of Objections, we preliminarily found that Apple may have restricted competition, to the benefit of its own solution Apple Pay. If confirmed, such a conduct would be illegal under our competition rules,” Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

Regulators argue that Apple has significant market power in the mobile device market and dominates mobile wallets. The Commission argues that the company is abusing this power by reserving access to NFC tech on its devices to Apple Pay, to the detriment of competitors and consumers.

Apple will now have time to examine the allegations and respond to them as part of the ongoing investigation.

The Statement of Objections should not be confused with being a final judgement — though Vestager has already rejected counterarguments concerning security and regulators seem deaf to the need for user privacy.

What Apple says

In a statement provided to me, Apple defended itself, saying: “We designed Apple Pay to provide an easy and secure way for users to digitally present their existing payment cards and for banks and other financial institutions to offer contactless payments for their customers.

“Apple Pay is only one of many options available to European consumers for making payments and has ensured equal access to NFC while setting industry-leading standards for privacy and security. We will continue to engage with the Commission to ensure European consumers have access to the payment option of their choice in a safe and secure environment.”

It is worth noting that Apple recently opened the NFC chip to Apple developers for use with Apple’s Tap to Pay feature, which turns iPhones into card readers. This does not yet allow rivals to use the NFC chip to make payments from iPhones. Apple also recently published a report that showed how successful third-party apps could be on its platforms.

What’s the history?

Apple really began laying the foundations for payment tech in iPhones years before the 2014 introduction of Apple Pay. In 2010, it acquired contactless/near field communications tech firm, VIVOtech and soon recruited industry expert Benjamin Vigier as its product manager of mobile commerce.

Vigier was likely a key hire to enable Apple’s plans; he also led development of mobile payment systems for Starbucks and Paypal. That hire wasn’t random. Apple had already filed patents for use of NFC tech by then, and speculation concerning Apple’s plans to hold flight tickets on iPhones had already begun.

When Apple did launch the service, it did so long behind everyone else, but Apple Pay soon eclipsed that of similar services from Samsung, HTC, and others. It turned out that people making mobile payments wanted brand trust, security, and biometric identity to seal these transactions.

Since then, Apple Pay has possibly become the most widely used NFC-based payment system in the world; it’s arguable that the iPhone maker has done more than most to break down initial consumer resistance to mobile payment systems.

Why is this happening?

Apple is a victim of its own success. When the company introduced the iPod and launched its iTunes ecosystem, it was a small company fighting for survival against Microsoft and others.

The same basic business plan Apple used with iTunes was subsequently transposed around iPhone and the App Store. Today the company has become the world’s most valuable tech company, which means it is under a different set of rules.

While before it was a small player fighting for position, today it has become a major firm and must anticipate scrutiny. It must also develop a new approach to this side of its business, while shoring up revenue elsewhere.

It seems inevitable the mobile payments space would become messy.

Arguably, most mobile payment systems have failed amid suspicion about the entire sector that emerged in 2010. Apple has built a far deeper currency of trust across its customer base and seems to have bigger ambitions in the financial services space. These ambitions inevitably pit the company against incumbents in the space, so it’s of little surprise to see the regulators getting involved.

What’s at stake?

Money. If the EU finds Apple guilty, it could be fined up to 10% of its global turnover, though it is unlikely to be punished to that extent. Apple Pay is used by more than 2,500 banks in Europe along with over 250 challenger banks and fintech services.

In the background, we also have continued speculation around Apple’s plans to introduce new payment services and to extend Apple Card availability outside the US. Associated with this, we also hear rumors the company may intend to launch an Apple-as-a-service plan.

What might happen?

Apple seems ready to fight tooth and claw to protect its strategy of making some features platform specific. Total control of its ecosystem has always been part of its approach, so this is philosophically in keeping with that strategy.

All the same, the shades of tech regulation cast heavy shadows on the company at this time, and as in any conflict resolution will eventually be reached through a combination of negotiation and regulation.

This could take years, but the arguments being made elsewhere concerning its ecosystem probably also apply here.

I think the ultimate question will be how much Apple can charge third-party companies for access to profitable parts of its system without being seen as anti-competitive. And to what extent will regulatory activity dilute the user experience?

During the course of events, I imagine Apple will attempt to say that those complaining about its business practices in mobile payments are attempting to capitalize on its work, given other attempts to create systems as popular as its own have already failed.

That argument likely won’t win regulators over to its position, but may help the company justify a right to demand a slice of any future transactions made using its platforms on services provided by third parties. I doubt the latter will get a free ride.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Otter.ai has been updated for iOS, introducing new tools that move it forward from being a transcription solution toward becoming a work productivity hub. Sam Liang, Otter.ai co-founder and CEO, told me a little about the company’s plans.

Otter wants to make distanced working meaningful

We know the pandemic accelerated adoption of remote and hybrid working practices. While this was a visible direction before COVID-19, the need to maintain distance meant even the most refusenik bosses had to support Work from Home (WFH), at least for a while.

It is, of course, true to say that some of these hard-won freedoms have been eroded in some workplaces of late, but remote and hybrid work has seen wider acceptance than ever before. Even Apple, albeit reluctantly, seems to have accepted that staff don’t need to be in the office every day of the week.

A recent Topia study claims 94% of employees think they should be able to work from anywhere, so long as they get their work done. With 34% of workers prepared to resign this year if they don’t get the flexibility they need, it’s only a matter of time before employers truly embrace these new workflows. It turns out that most businesses are run by humans, and they need to be heard.

Perhaps inevitably, remote work prompted a huge shift toward virtual and hybrid meetings. Otter claims over 500 million people attend such meetings daily. The company has seen a 400% increase in the number of meeting minutes it’ transcribed year-on-year — from 3 billion minutes to 12 billion in the last 12 months.

Even while changing the way we work represents a cultural shift that makes some business leaders uncomfortable, it also enables real advantages to smart companies willing to engage with the trend.

Where we are going

Liang explains:

“Before the pandemic, the traditional norms of how meetings were conducted and how businesses were run did not always leverage the skills of everyone and didn’t encourage collaboration,” he said.

“We lived in an extroverted world where meetings were dominated by people who could hear and process information, not worry about distractions, and liked to speak up. This type of communication not only was exclusive and lacking accessibility for many professionals, it prevented a lot of valuable productivity and collaboration.”

Remote work changed this dynamic. It created a slightly more equal environment in which introverts gained a better chance to be heard. And tools like Otter are yielding additional benefits, such as in accessibility. Hard-of-hearing employees can join a meeting and use Otter’s real time transcription to follow the conversation in real time. 

“In this new hybrid work world, more companies are enabling new modalities, meetings, use cases — inherently pushing new tools into the world that empower businesses to leverage all of their talent more and encourage collaboration,” the Otter CEO told me.

The impact? Many improvements in work/life balance that give employees the flexibility they need to do their job both in and out the office, asynchronously, when and where they need to be — with the addition of boosted productivity to ice that cake.

That’s the context, so what’s new in Otter.ai?

Otter.ai’s new tools

The new Otter.ai introduces a series of useful tools to help augment communication using technology – and delivers tools that may optimize those meetings for you.

The Home Feed & Calendar feature, for instance, acts as a central repository of information about your meetings, making it easy to access conversations, highlights of conversations, and any tagged action items.

If you connect your calendar, you’ll also see any upcoming scheduled meetings and can invite Otter Assistant to join in, capture, and share meeting notes. You can also ask the assistant to attend and capture a meeting on your behalf if you can’t make it.

Meeting Gems is another useful tool. These can be generated directly from your meeting by highlighting snippets within the notes. You can use them during the meeting to quickly flag action items or decisions, and then assign, comment, or query those items.

[Also read: In the new workplace, all we want is a chance to Flow and grow]

Why this matters

I think most people can remember when in-person meetings became something like vast workplace icebergs looming into your schedule. You’d know that no matter how busy you happened to be, for the entire period of that meeting you’d get nothing done. You’d sit in a meeting room with your teams to listen to the most dominant voices (and the rare and often-ignored quiet ones) and if you were lucky, someone might remember to take notes.

Poorly managed meetings become a colossal waste of time. This kind of meeting etiquette has been forced to change with the advent of the pandemic. Not only did workers quickly find that taking notes was incredibly important for there to be any chance to make meetings effective, but collaboration software providers soon saw the need to integrate with other solutions to make meeting time productive. Zoom Marketplace (where Otter is also available) is an illustration of how that company recognized this.

Liang said Otter’s primary mission is to make communication productive. Given the root of the solution is AI, he explained: “One way of doing that is turning voice conversations into automated actionable insights,” he said.

To get some sense of the approach Liang’s company is taking, he pointed to Automatic Outlines, another new tool currently in beta with business users. It’s a simple but incredibly useful solution to automatically create a meeting summary, “so you and your colleagues can easily access a summary of what was discussed.”

The final score?

No one ever really needs to leave a meeting without notes again – and you don’t even need to be at a meeting to gain insight into what happened.

In my opinion, the steady confluence of all these technologies means remote meetings will soon become more effective than in-person interactions, because the technology has evolved to augment in-meeting communication with tools to support the realization of the intent.

How much it costs

Not all the new features are available to every user. Otter offers four pricing tiers, the Basic free service, Pro ($8.33 per month), Business ($20 per month) and an Enterprise tier, which is negotiated with large clients. Of the new features, Basic users can access Meeting Gems.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Have you recently been on a video confefence call, hit the “mute” button and then offered up some nasty comments about a client or a colleague — or even the boss?

Or maybe while in a conference room with colleagues — muted — and pointed out that some proposed action would violate the terms of a secret acquisition in its final stages?

If you were comfortable that the mute button was actively protecting your secret, you shouldn’t have been.

Thanks to some impressive experimentation and research from a group of academics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Loyola University Chicago, utterances made while the app is in mute are still captured and saved into RAM.

On one level, this is something we all already knew. When a user is muted and says something, most videoconferencing apps will display a note alerting the user that they’re talking while muted. How could it say that if it weren’t listening while the mute button is on? 

Just as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are always listening for a command word, so, too, are those “muted” applications. 

The real question is whether those captured utterances are at meaningful risk for being accessed by an attacker or an insider. First, anything saved in volatile memory is lost — theoretically — the instant the machine restarts or shuts down. Therefore, we are looking at the exposure after the utterance is made and before that machine restarts. Depending on the user’s behavior, that timeframe might be a few hours, a couple of days — possibly multiple weeks. 

Generally, stealing data from volatile memory is difficult, but not impossible. As the report authors said in a group interview, if a bad guy gets into volatile memory, the user and the enterprise have a lot bigger concerns than some saved utterances during a mute. Still, it could happen.

The mute issue is solely based on the app and how it handles such data.

One of the lead authors of the report is Kassem Fawaz, an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is also affiliated with Wisconsin’s Computer Sciences Department. 

“The main implications have to do with the inherent trust users are placing in these videoconferencing apps,” Fawaz said. “We did not find evidence of audio leaving the user’s devices. The only exception was telemetry data leaving from Cisco Webex, which has been fixed since our disclosure to Ciscom. However, even when the user presses the mute button, the app still has access to the audio stream and the user is trusting that the app is well-behaved. The other implication is that the mute functionality — similar to turning off the camera — should not be left to the app, but should be either OS-controlled or hardware-controlled.”

Fawaz’s point about the camera is that the team found that a camera “off” button truly halted any video from being captured in any way. Not so much with audio. Sometimes, the browser can make a difference.

“On Chrome, mute means mute,” Fawaz said. “We can’t say about Safari or Firefox.”

The university’s report was mostly about trust in the app makers. If the vendors are acting honorably and respecting privacy, cybersecurity, and security compliance issues, then the risk is minimal. If they are not acting that way, users and enterprises could be in trouble.

The report didn’t draw conclusions on how the app makers were behaving, but merely stressed that each one can go in its own direction.

That said, the rules of secrecy and even the rules of being a nice person should apply here. With the imminent-acquisition scenario, if you’re not allowed to discuss certain details, don’t say them in front of a microphone with outsiders regardless of what the mute toggle displays. As for being nice, how about not saying nasty comments about your colleagues or clients at all? 

The cardinal rule of email and security/compliance is, “Before you type an email/message, envision yourself testifying to it in open court. If that makes you uncomfortable, don’t type it.” It’s not a far leap to extend that rule to speaking something in front of a microphone. 

For example, I use an Apple Watch. Several times during a typical day, it will say loudly “I didn’t understand that” or “Here’s what I found on that topic.” Although it is highly annoying and frustrating, it’s an effective reminder that I need to take that watch off before saying anything that I don’t want the world to know.

You need to keep in mind the same thing when using a mobile device or a desktop device — especially while using a videoconferencing app.