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.
How was there double consent required?
Without ATT companies use dark patterns, opt-out, and over burdensome Privacy Policies or Terms of Service to get what they claim is consent.
When users get a straightforward choice to allow tracking or not, like with ATT, most don’t allow it.
That’s the issue. You also have the GDPR consent so you have to allow tracking there AND in the ATT to be tracked. GDPR consent forms are more complicated so most people just hit accept.
The issue here is that ad companies aren’t making as much off Apple users as they could be and I’m disgusted that this is something that an EU member state is now fighting for…