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.
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.