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.
In the sense that never letting your child go outside is “protecting them from harm.”
Apple has long told users what is and isn’t safe. Those safeguards should be available, but the choice to use them and to what degree of intensity should be at the user’s discretion - not Apple’s.