France’s Competition Authority (Autorité de la Concurrence) has imposed a €150 million fine on Apple for restricting third-party apps and advertisers from collecting user personal data through its implementation of the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework.
The ATT framework, a privacy protection mechanism in iOS, requires third-party apps to display a pop-up notification requesting user authorization for personal data collection upon first use. However, under the GDPR and the French Data Protection Act, such pop-ups were deemed insufficient for legally collecting user data. Third-party apps must separately obtain renewed user consent to lawfully gather data. Consequently, the ATT framework was ruled “neither necessary nor proportionate to the company’s stated goal to protect user data.”
The French Competition Authority noted that in 2022, Apple had already been fined €8 million by the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) for collecting user identifiers without consent, violating Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act (which transposes the EU’s ePrivacy Directive) regarding cookie usage. Now, while introducing a unified “Personalized Ads” pop-up for its own apps, Apple has designed the system in a way that forces third-party apps to obtain user consent twice—a practice deemed as self-preferencing and anti-competitive.
This decision highlights tensions between privacy-focused technological measures and competition law, emphasizing that privacy claims must align with legal proportionality requirements.
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