Apple has been the target of an antitrust complaint in Germany for three years over its App Tracking Transparency feature. ATT allows iPhone users to request that apps not track their activity between other apps.
Now the Bundeskartellamt antitrust group in Germany has issued its βpreliminary legal assessmentβ which alleges that ATT only applying to third-party apps and not Apple violates antitrust policy.
In todayβs release, the German antitrust group alleges that Apple holds third-party apps to a different privacy standard than Appleβs own apps, specifically when it comes to activity tracking for advertising.
TheΒ BundeskartellamtΒ has today sent AppleΒ Inc., Cupertino,Β USA, and AppleΒ GmbH, Munich, its preliminary legal assessment of Appleβs βApp Tracking Transparency Frameworkβ (ATTF).
Since the implementation of theΒ ATTFΒ in April 2021, providers offering apps in theΒ iOSΒ App Store have had to obtain additional consent from users before gaining access to certain data for advertising purposes.
However, the strict requirements under theΒ ATTFΒ only apply to third-party app providers, not to Apple itself. In theΒ Bundeskartellamtβspreliminary view, this may be prohibited under the special abuse control provisions for large digital companies (Section 19a(2) of the German Competition Act (GWB)) and under the general abuse control provisions of Article 102Β TFEU.
Apple now has a chance to respond to the Bundeskartellamt release.
Meanwhile, App Tracking Transparency has basically become a non-issue for major advertising apps like Facebook. Meta has actually improved its advertising prowess and been empowered by ATT, partially with the help of AI, to target users more precisely than with lazy third-party tracking.
