Italy fines Apple 98 million euros for App Store tracking policy
The Italian competition authority has fined Apple 98 million euros for exploiting its "position of absolute dominance" through the App Store, accusing the company of unfairly burdening app developers with its tracking rules.
Regulators said Apple abused its dominance in the iOS app distribution market by imposing App Tracking Transparency rules that unfairly burden third-party developers.
The authority found that Apple forced developers to require double user consent for advertising data - going beyond what privacy law requires - undermining ad-based business models without providing commensurate privacy benefits.
This duplication, concludes the Italian Competition Authority, "results in a lack of proportionality in the ATT policy rules, given that Apple should have guaranteed the same level of user privacy by offering developers the possibility of obtaining consent for profiling in a single step".
The decision comes after a lengthy investigation conducted in coordination with the European Commission and the Italian data protection regulator, examining the impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework.
Scrutiny of the policy has intensified across Europe. In March, the French competition authority fined Apple 150 million euros, finding that the way the feature was implemented placed an unnecessary burden on app developers without being strictly necessary to protect user privacy.
App Tracking Transparency, introduced by Apple in 2021, requires apps distributed through the App Store to ask for explicit user permission through a standard window before tracking activity across other apps and websites.
If consent is denied, developers lose access to data typically used for targeted advertising.
Competition authorities have raised concerns that the system, imposed unilaterally by Apple, could harm third-party developers and ad brokers, while Apple continues to profit from its own advertising business within the iOS ecosystem.
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