In a bizarre ruling, the French antitrust regulatory body Autorité de la Concurrence fined Apple €150 million for App Tracking Transparency, the iOS feature that allows users to prevent apps from tracking their online activities. But it isn’t requiring Apple to make any changes to the feature.
“The Autorité de la Concurrence has fined Apple €150,000,000 for abusing its dominant position in the sector for the distribution of mobile applications on iOS and iPadOS devices between April 2021 and July 2023,” the regulatory agency announced. “The Autorité had previously rejected a request for interim measures in the case, while deciding to pursue the investigation into the merits.”
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I’m having trouble understanding the ruling. The regulatory agency says that while the objective of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is not “at its core problematic,” the implementation of this feature is “neither necessary for nor proportionate with Apple’s stated objective of protecting personal data.”
It claims that this feature leads to “multiple pop-ups … making the use of third-party applications in the iOS environment excessively complex.” And it found that “the rules governing the interaction between the different pop-up windows displayed undermined the neutrality of the framework, causing definite economic harm to application publishers and advertising service providers.” I don’t live in France, but my experience is that ATT triggers exactly one pop-up, which lets the user decide to allow or deny tracking. (Laurent does live in France, and he confirmed that his experience is identical.)
Apparently, it requires two pop-ups when the user (stupidly) agrees to be tracked. That’s because there is a separate GDPR notification that EU residents have to deal with.
Interestingly, the regulatory agency also claims that ATT disproportionately punishes smaller publishers that “depend to a large extent on third-party data collection to finance their business.” This, too, is unclear: Some of the largest publishers–like Meta/Facebook–overwhelmingly rely on “data collection” for their revenues, too. But requiring Apple to let its users be tracked by companies, regardless of size, isn’t just morally wrong, it should be legally unacceptable as well.
The Autorité de la Concurrence investigated ATT because “several associations representing various online advertising players”–no doubt funded by Meta/Facebook–complained that this feature was “an obstacle to targeted advertising to Apple device users.”
The problem here, it says, is that Apple is a “dominant player” that limits the “commercial freedom, quality, and diversity” of the smaller operators that are forced to go through its platforms to each their users. Apple’s rules, it says, are “disproportionate or lack objective justification,” and because they can harm smaller players, they can ultimately “harm consumer interests,” too. Despite the fact that ATT exists specifically to help consumer interests.
“The implementation [of ATT] artificially complicates the use of third-party applications and distorts the neutrality of the framework to the detriment of small publishers financed by advertising,” it says. “[And] the ATT framework imposed by Apple is not necessary, insofar as the consent obtained is not valid under the applicable laws, in particular the French Data Protection Act.”
There is one part of this ruling I do agree with: The agency correctly notes that none of Apple’s apps trigger this notification (or set of notifications should a user agree to be tracked).
“Apple has introduced a single ‘Personalized Advertising’ pop-up to collect user consent for its own data collection,” it notes, “while continuing to require double consent for third-party data collection by publishers.”
It’s not clear what Apple has to do, if anything, at this point. Trigger one fewer notification if a user is dumb enough to allow any app to track its activities online? It doesn’t address that.
But if you are an iPhone or iPad user, this much is clear. Don’t allow apps to track your activities online. Open Settings, navigate to Privacy & Security > Tracking and disable the top option, “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” You’ll never see a single pop-up notification related to this feature, and apps won’t track your activities online.
