Apple Slammed with €150M Fine Over Privacy Rules!
Apple has been slapped with a penalty of 150 million euros ($162 million) by French antitrust authorities for ATT, which is currently under investigation in several other European countries.
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According to the French Competition Authority in its judgment, Apple’s introduction of ATT was “neither necessary nor proportionate to the company’s stated goal to protect user data” and imposed an unfair burden on third-party publishers.
According to ATT, any application requires explicit consent through a pop-up before any activity can be tracked across any of the other applications or websites. If a user refuses, the app can no longer access the user’s advertising identifier, and thus targeted advertising becomes impossible. Critics have claimed that the new rule does not only favor Apple, but also limits competition while endorsing Apple’s own advertising services.
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According to the French watchdog, ATT forces users to swim through excessive consent screens for third-party applications before they can access their iPhones and iPads, which makes the process unnecessarily cumbersome.
Furthermore, it is unusual that an opt-out is required from ad tracking twice on Apple’s system instead of once, which according to the authority, was at the disadvantage of the neutrality of the feature and harmful economically to app publishers and ad service providers.
The ruling cited the case of smaller publishers dependent on third-party data aggregation for revenue. After hearing complaints from the advertising industry, the French regulator had refused to take emergency measures in 2021, but it later proceeded in its investigation, which led to the ruling on Monday.
Apart from the monetary penalty, Apple has also been ordered to publish the ruling on its website for a period of seven days. This ruling coincides with the investigations currently ongoing in Germany, Italy, Romania, and Poland into ATT that was introduced to the world by Apple in 2021 as some form of privacy safeguard.
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