Europe vs. App Tracking Transparency
In its statement issued earlier this week to the German Press Agency, Apple said the following:
“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers. (…) We will continue to urge the relevant authorities in Germany, Italy and across Europe to allow Apple to continue providing this important privacy tool to our users.”
Germany launched a probe into App Tracking Transparency back in 2022, and in February 2025, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office preliminarily ruled that Apple abused its market power with ATT, giving itself preferential treatment, even though Apple says it does not collect data from third-party apps. The cartel said that Apple’s restrictions made it “far more difficult” for app publishers to access user data relevant for advertising.
In March 2025, Apple was fined 150 million euros by France’s Competition Authority. French regulators said that Apple complicated the process for users to opt out of tracking and unfairly disadvantaged third-party developers and ad providers. Apple is facing a similar investigation in Italy, with a ruling expected later this year.
Apple would rather disable app tracking prevention in Europe entirely than to have to conform to the rules in its own apps that it imposes on third party developers.
And then it tries to blame regulators and lobbyists for the situation.
At every turn, Apple is determined to prove that it’s a scummy company that can’t remotely be trusted
“Apple (…) holds itself to a higher standard than it requires of any third-party developer. [Just trust us, bro 🤞]”
Apple does LOTS of telemetry and tracking in their apps. They just believe that it’s okay because they are trustworthy because they said so.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Regulators are now catching on how Apple uses protecting users as an excuse for anticompetitive practices.
Previously:
- Meta Allegedly Bypassed App Tracking Transparency
- Lessons From San Bernardino and ICEBlock
- France Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency
- App Store Search Queries Appear to Violate Data Minimization Practices
- Keeping Your Data From Apple Is Harder Than Expected
- Lawsuits Over Apple Analytics Switch
- Apple Is Building a Demand-side Platform
- French Publishers Make App Store Antitrust Complaint
- German Antitrust Probe Into App Tracking Transparency
- Plenty of Tracking Despite App Tracking Transparency
- Expectations When Opting Out of Tracking
- Does Apple News Track You?
- Facebook Educates About App Tracking Transparency
- Snapchat’s App Tracking Transparency Workaround
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>> Apple does LOTS of telemetry and tracking in their apps. They just believe that it’s okay because they are trustworthy because they said so.<<
I'm sure you have the option to opt in or out of sharing telemetry with Apple when you first set up a device.
That's system-wide crash reporting and usage data; it doesn't pertain to app usage metrics and personalisation in the news and storefront apps. For that you have to turn off Apple ad personalisation, turn off personalisation/recommendation within each app, and throw away your identifier from time to time in each app's settings. It's a sham claim to care about your privacy, and it's the main reason I don't use Apple News or Podcasts.
@Niall Please see the linked posts. Even if you opt out of everything in all the buried settings, it still sends telemetry and links it to your account. 20+ class action lawsuits about this.
And even if you can opt-out fully (which you can't), it is still not compliant with the App Tracking Transparency, where an app is supposed to present a Scary™ alert to the user, explicitly asking for tracking, whereas Apple's tracking is enabled by default, and you have to dig in settings to find all the cases where you can turn off.
I don't understand why Apple uniquely has so many people will to do mental gymnastics to excuse anything that company does (aka "fanboys"). This is, and always has been, largely an Apple exclusive phenomenon.
@niall When Apple first added the Fitness+ service to all their devices, there was a splash warning screen that said “hey if you continue, we will track what workouts you look at, even if you don’t do those”. The only way to avoid the tracking was to never open that tab. On paper, you could say they gave you an option, but an option of “never look at this or we track everything you look at” is no option at all, and exactly the sort of thing that ATT is supposed to prevent.
