Monday, March 31, 2025 - French antitrust regulators have fined Apple 150 million euros ($162 million) over its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which is facing scrutiny in multiple European countries. The French Competition Authority ruled that Apple's implementation of ATT was “neither necessary nor proportionate to the company’s stated goal to protect user data” and unfairly penalized third-party publishers.
Alongside the financial penalty, Apple has been ordered to
publish the decision on its website for seven days. The ruling comes amid
ongoing investigations in Germany, Italy, Romania, and Poland into ATT, which
Apple introduced in 2021 as a privacy safeguard.
ATT requires apps to obtain explicit user consent via a
pop-up before tracking activity across other apps and websites. If users
decline, the app loses access to their advertising identifier, limiting
targeted advertising. Critics argue that the system disproportionately benefits
Apple by restricting competitors while promoting its own advertising services.
The French watchdog found that ATT forces users to navigate
excessive consent windows for third-party apps on iPhones and iPads, making the
process unnecessarily complicated. Additionally, Apple’s system requires users
to opt out of ad tracking twice rather than once, which the authority said
undermines the feature’s neutrality and causes economic harm to app publishers
and ad service providers.
The ruling emphasized that smaller publishers, which rely
heavily on third-party data collection for revenue, are particularly affected.
The French regulator initially declined to impose emergency measures in 2021
after complaints from the advertising industry, but continued its
investigation, ultimately leading to Monday’s decision.
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