The French antitrust regulator said it has issued a statement of investigation to Apple, citing concerns that the U.S. technology company may have violated regulatory provisions related to the use of iPhone user data for advertising purposes.
The agency said it was concerned that Apple may be “abusing its dominant position by imposing discriminatory, non-objective and non-transparent terms for the use of user data for advertising purposes.”
In short, the French regulator will investigate whether Apple is unfairly using its monopoly as an app store operator to negatively impact advertising companies.
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According to reports, the complaint was filed in 2020 by four French advertising groups, who claimed that Apple had tweaked its privacy feature, which is known as App Tracking Transparency (ATT), and that it had led to a decline in revenue for publishers.
The four associations (IAB France, MMAF, SRI and UDECAM) said that this privacy change by Apple was not in line with the EU’s privacy regulations, as this mechanism does not apply to Apple’s own apps.
In fact, the investigation is rather contradictory in that they allow the exercise of the right to a defense, but cannot prejudge the guilt or innocence of the company that received notice of the complaint.
Apple has responded to the matter, noting that the regulator has been positive about its data protection policies in the past:
“App Tracking Transparency gives users more initiative by requiring all apps to ask permission before tracking them. Apple, like all other developers, must comply with ATT. apple’s apps do not display ATT prompts because they do not track, which means they do not link user or device data with user or device data collected from other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties, and they do not share user or device data with data brokers for the purposes of targeted ads or ad measurement”. . In addition, Apple holds its advertising business to a higher standard of privacy than it does for any other developer, and it will require users to expressly consent before delivering personalized ads. We have previously received strong support for ATT’s objectives from regulators and privacy advocates, including from the FCA and CNIL, and we will continue to engage constructively with the FCA to ensure that users always have control over their data.”
