An essential function for your privacy that could disappear from iPhones in France and throughout the European Union. Since April 2021, Apple has offered a system called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which allows users to refuse to be tracked by external applications for advertising purposes on their smartphone.
Presented as additional protection for your private data, it does not please many actors, especially in Europe, who could soon celebrate its disappearance.
“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other European countries could force us to remove this feature to the detriment of European consumers,” Apple warned German press agency DPA.
A system subject to several investigations
Since its implementation, the TCA has attracted criticism from the advertising industry, but has also been the subject of investigations by competition authorities. Constant difficulties that Apple deplores.
Among them, the company suffered a new failure in Germany last February, when the Court of Justice ruled in favor of the Federal Cartel Office. The country’s highest court confirmed his placement under surveillance by competition authorities, thus allowing German police to continue their investigations into the TCA.
The Federal Cartel Office criticizes Apple, among other things, for imposing its system on other app providers and not itself. The authority believes that the company’s rules do not prevent it from combining data from your App Store, Apple ID or connected devices to use it for advertising purposes. For its part, the American giant has assured that its applications do not collect data from third-party applications.
While it is not known when the Federal Cartel Office will make its decision, the Italian competition authority plans to rule on the issue in December. Note that Apple was also sanctioned in France for its tool earlier this year. The French competition body imposed a fine of 150 million euros on it at the end of March, accusing it of having abused its dominant position between April 2021 and July 2023 before the ATT, which penalized third-party publishers.
find a solution
Faced with these difficulties, Apple assured that it had proposed other solutions to the authorities in addition to its device, but without being able to dispel their concerns. “We will continue to urge relevant authorities in Germany, Italy, and across Europe to allow Apple to continue providing this important privacy tool to our users,” the company said.
However, this risks becoming complicated for you, especially since the competition police have proposed alternatives to the TCA. But the American giant believes that these compromise its tool.
Source: BFM TV
