Italy slaps Apple with $115 million penalty in App Tracking Transparency case

With App Tracking Transparency, apps are required to get a user’s permission to track or access their device’s advertising identifier.
Italy’s antitrust watchdog, the AGCM, announced on Monday that it has imposed a €98.6 million ($115.53 million) fine on Apple and two subsidiaries for allegedly abusing its dominant position in the iOS app distribution market.
The authority determined that Apple violated EU competition rules through its App Store, leveraging an “absolute dominance” over third-party developers by unilaterally imposing restrictive terms via its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. Apple responded in a statement that it “strongly disagrees” with the ruling, arguing that it “disregards the important privacy protections” offered by the company’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompt.
Reuters:
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The watchdog opened the probe into the technology giant in May 2023, claiming the company penalised third-party app developers by imposing “a more restrictive privacy policy” on them from April 2021.
AGCM said that Apple required third-party developers to obtain specific consent for data collection and linking data for advertising purposes through the ATT screen imposed by the company.
“The terms of the ATT policy are imposed unilaterally, they are detrimental to the interests of Apple’s business partners and are not proportionate to achieving the objective of privacy, as claimed by the company,” the regulator said in a statement, adding the process does not comply with privacy regulations.
ATT was created “to give users a simple way to control whether companies can track their activity across other apps and websites,” the tech company said, adding the rules apply equally to all developers, including Apple.
The firm will appeal the regulator’s decision and reiterated its commitment “to defend strong privacy protections”.

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MacDailyNews Take: Listen, we love Italy, but organization and attention to detail are not among their strong points. When – if – the power comes back on today in Italy, we hope they can agree with this:
“Apple does not track users across third-party apps and websites, selling user tracking data to other companies, which is why Apple apps do not display the App Tracking Transparency prompt to obtain the users’ permission to allow the collection of end user data and the sharing of it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and web sites.” – MacDailyNews, June 14, 2022
Apple employs on-device intelligence and other features to minimize the data that the company collects in Apple’s apps, browsers, and online services, and the company does not create a single comprehensive user data profile across all of our apps and services.
More info: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Your_Data.pdf

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