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.
This is the wrong fucking outcome…
The verdict should have been what protects consumers the most, not what benefits advertisers the most. Apple should have been forced to add the same privacy inquiries to their own first party apps.
They already are forced to do it. The only reason the popup doesn’t appear is because they are not tracking the user on third party services.