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 “preliminary legal assessment” which alleges that ATT only applying to third-party apps and not Apple violates antitrust policy.
In today’s release, the German antitrust group alleges that Apple holds third-party apps to a different privacy standard than Apple’s own apps, specifically when it comes to activity tracking for advertising.
The Bundeskartellamt has today sent Apple Inc., Cupertino, USA, and Apple GmbH, Munich, its preliminary legal assessment of Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency Framework” (ATTF).
Since the implementation of the ATTF in April 2021, providers offering apps in the iOS App Store have had to obtain additional consent from users before gaining access to certain data for advertising purposes.
However, the strict requirements under the ATTF only apply to third-party app providers, not to Apple itself. In the Bundeskartellamt’spreliminary 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 102 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.
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