App Tracking Transparency: Apple pays almost 100 million euros fine in Italy
Apple wants to protect its users on the iPhone from cross-app tracking. Regulators consider this market manipulation – and are demanding hefty fees.
Example of an ATT query: Illegal market manipulation that Apple also profits from?
(Image: heise medien)
Apple's so-called App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, is causing the company trouble in another country: Italy's market watchdog AGCM (AutoritĂ garante della concorrenza e del mercato) wants to see a total of 98.6 million euros, according to a press release from last week, because the feature that allows users to prevent cross-app advertising tracking on the iPhone "hinders competition." The Italians are thus following similar assessments from other European regions, including Germany, France, Poland, and Great Britain.
Authority: Developers must ask for data twice – and that harms them
"The authority's findings confirmed, from a competition law perspective, the restrictive nature of the App Tracking Transparency directive (...) towards third-party app developers distributed via the App Store," the regulator stated. Third-party app developers would have to obtain separate consent for the collection and linking of data for advertising purposes via the ATT dialog. The AGCM explains the penalty with an interesting reasoning: this dialog does not meet the requirements of data protection legislation, so developers are forced to implement a second – their own – consent request for the same purpose.
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"The double consent request, which inevitably results from the ATT directive in its current implementation, restricts the collection, linking, and use of such data," the authority writes. The AGCM's approach differs from other assessments of ATT – such as that of the German Federal Cartel Office. There, it was stated that the main reason for concern was that the "strict requirements" of the ATT system only apply to other app providers, but not to Apple itself. However, France, in its action against Apple's system, had argued similarly to the AGCM. It is excessively difficult for developers to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with ATT if they want to track.
End of ATT in Germany and elsewhere is near
Apple is likely to contest the AGCM's antitrust fine. The company stated in a statement that it strongly disagrees with the assessment. As in France, there is also a loophole: the ATT pop-up could be made "more compliant" with the GDPR. How, however, is unclear, especially since the assessments regularly seem to change at the EU level.
In principle, the feature is very popular – many users do not want data to be passed from one app to another. Providers are now using tricks to circumvent Apple's restrictions, against which the iPhone manufacturer is taking action. In October, Apple $(LB4962515:publicly warned that it might have to disable the anti-tracking feature in Germany – as well as in other EU countries.
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