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.
Yeah, they can still personalize somewhat based upon what other people in your area are getting as personalized ads. There’s an upside though, and that’s that by disabling personalized ads, you cut their income from you by as much as 60% since they can’t target you with stuff that will supposedly appeal to you. That’s why they sued apple, advertisers are losing hundreds of millions every year on that.
So you should disable personalized ads anyway out of spite.