Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store.
In a press release, the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same data collection.
Requiring such “double consent” was “extremely burdensome” and “harmful” to some developers—especially the smallest developers, the regulator said. Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue after the policy was introduced, as users increasingly declined to opt into personalized ads.
fineCost of doing businessApple reported $32.43B in Operating Profit for its fiscal quarter ending in September of 2025.
The reading comprehension of people reading this news piece is unfathomably low.
How was there double consent required?
Without ATT companies use dark patterns, opt-out, and over burdensome Privacy Policies or Terms of Service to get what they claim is consent.
When users get a straightforward choice to allow tracking or not, like with ATT, most don’t allow it.
That’s the issue. You also have the GDPR consent so you have to allow tracking there AND in the ATT to be tracked. GDPR consent forms are more complicated so most people just hit accept.
The issue here is that ad companies aren’t making as much off Apple users as they could be and I’m disgusted that this is something that an EU member state is now fighting for…
Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue
Nobody feels bothered by this part? Manipulating users of your app is a competition concern, because you can’t do that as much as Apple?
This is the wrong fucking outcome…
The verdict should have been what protects consumers the most, not what benefits advertisers the most. Apple should have been forced to add the same privacy inquiries to their own first party apps.
They already are forced to do it. The only reason the popup doesn’t appear is because they are not tracking the user on third party services.
Italian Competition Authority wants less privacy for the people. I feel like Apple are the good guys in this case.
I do not consent to your bullshit. I don’t care how you phrase it. I don’t care how difficult you make it to express. I will never, ever, consent to tracking or personalized ads.
And the thing is, you fucking well know it! No one opts in except through obfuscation.
Wow! A whole .1% of their fourth quarter revenue! That’ll show em!
They shouldn’t be fined for this at all. They were sued because ad companies couldn’t target ads to people if apple allowed them to opt-out. That’s fucked up, people shouldn’t have to hand their data over to advertisers if they don’t want to.
I found that if I opted out of personalized ads they started showing dick pill ads with half naked women asking my kids if they wanted to get rock hard. Turned personalized ads back on and it’s divorce lawyer ads from my divorce two years ago. Lose/lose.
Yeah, they can still personalize somewhat based upon what other people in your area are getting as personalized ads. There’s an upside though, and that’s that by disabling personalized ads, you cut their income from you by as much as 60% since they can’t target you with stuff that will supposedly appeal to you. That’s why they sued apple, advertisers are losing hundreds of millions every year on that.
So you should disable personalized ads anyway out of spite.
Part of the problem here is that those extra permissions weren’t required if you used Apple’s ad service. They stifled competition in their own favor.
Its insane how much billions they’re allowed to make while we get none of it.
Fuck your ads and fuck you not wanting to seek consent to steal from people. Fucking disgusting
More billion-dollar companies need to be fined for being “uncouth.”
Do they need to be fined for wanting better privacy for their users, which is the case here?
That is not at all the case here. They are creating hoops to maintain their de facto monopoly. Don’t try to sell it as apple are being the good guys here.
Hoops for companies who want your private information without telling you?
Oh the pain, won’t someone think of the poor corporations 🥺
In the sense that never letting your child go outside is “protecting them from harm.”
Apple has long told users what is and isn’t safe. Those safeguards should be available, but the choice to use them and to what degree of intensity should be at the user’s discretion - not Apple’s.
I dunno—on the one hand, I can see where data consent that’s folded into a long user agreement might get overlooked and approved without thinking, and a second verification would be helpful; but on the other hand, the more times users are asked for consent, the more likely they are to agree reflexively to everything.
It seems like a user-configurable setting would be the best solution.
You are suggesting a user configurable setting, but that’s exactly what they had. Apple had a user wide setting, and then individual apps could ask to override that setting. I have personalized ads off in my general settings, and though I would never turn them on, if for whatever reason I did want to, the best way to get me to do that would be to ask in the specific app I wanted to give access to that. Absolutely no way I would change my overall settings just for the benefit of one app. Others have noted that a second layer of consent was only needed if you did not use the Apple provided ad option, because Apple already has your opt in/out on file. I hope this causes Apple to also display the pop-up for those using Apple ad options. Most people probably just agreed to the tracking when setting up their phone, so forcing Apple to show the pop-up even if an app is using Apple as their ad distributor is ideal in my opinion. Users will be much more likely to opt out even if their overall setting is opt in. This will ideally make Apple and non-Apple advertising options on an even playing field and is better for users. If anything, it’s probably worse for developers because had they just chosen to use Apple ads before they were probably more likely to get targeted ads from the user since Apple would bypass the pop-up.
