Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store.
In a press release, the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same data collection.
Requiring such “double consent” was “extremely burdensome” and “harmful” to some developers—especially the smallest developers, the regulator said. Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue after the policy was introduced, as users increasingly declined to opt into personalized ads.
I dunno—on the one hand, I can see where data consent that’s folded into a long user agreement might get overlooked and approved without thinking, and a second verification would be helpful; but on the other hand, the more times users are asked for consent, the more likely they are to agree reflexively to everything.
It seems like a user-configurable setting would be the best solution.
You are suggesting a user configurable setting, but that’s exactly what they had. Apple had a user wide setting, and then individual apps could ask to override that setting. I have personalized ads off in my general settings, and though I would never turn them on, if for whatever reason I did want to, the best way to get me to do that would be to ask in the specific app I wanted to give access to that. Absolutely no way I would change my overall settings just for the benefit of one app. Others have noted that a second layer of consent was only needed if you did not use the Apple provided ad option, because Apple already has your opt in/out on file. I hope this causes Apple to also display the pop-up for those using Apple ad options. Most people probably just agreed to the tracking when setting up their phone, so forcing Apple to show the pop-up even if an app is using Apple as their ad distributor is ideal in my opinion. Users will be much more likely to opt out even if their overall setting is opt in. This will ideally make Apple and non-Apple advertising options on an even playing field and is better for users. If anything, it’s probably worse for developers because had they just chosen to use Apple ads before they were probably more likely to get targeted ads from the user since Apple would bypass the pop-up.