A first-ever fine for Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency” tool will cost the company the equivalent of $162.4 million, as France’s antitrust regulators took the company to task for allegedly abusing its dominant market position.
Fielding complaints from app and game developers that publish on Apple’s App Store, the French Competition Authority (FCA) found that the app tracking tool was actually too supportive of user privacy; the complainants found it unfair that users could selectively disable personalized advertising in their products, but not Apple’s own apps. Apple provides a separate “Personalized Ads” setting that determines how first-party data is used within the company’s own ecosystem.
Antitrust decision follows prior EU actions, first of several pending investigations
While it is not exactly in keeping with the privacy decisions that usually come from big tech’s digital regulators, the decision by the FCA tracks with a long history of antitrust complaints and actions involving Apple’s approach to its app store and privacy settings. App Tracking Transparency has faced some level of controversy from the beginning for excluding Apple’s own pre-installed apps and handling them with special conditions. The company’s App Store payment terms have also courted controversy and lawsuits for years, with the European Commission assessing a fine of €1.84 billion over this issue a year ago in a case originally brought by Spotify.
App Tracking Transparency has been in place and mandatory for App Store apps since April 2021. App publishers have since been required to notify users of any personalized tracking during app downloads and updates and collect affirmative user consent to continue doing so; they are further required to not disable features of the app or limit functionality if the user opts out.
The FCA did not mandate that Apple make any specific changes to the feature as a condition of the fine, simply telling the company that it must bring it into compliance with the ruling. However, the agency did state that user ability to selectively disable app tracking was particularly unfair to smaller publishers who depend more heavily on third-party ad revenue. It additionally determined that the feature was not “necessary nor proportionate” to the company’s stated objective of protecting personal data.
In terms of specific changes Apple may have to make to achieve compliance, the FCA cited two central issues: forcing users to opt out of app tracking twice rather than just once, and the fact that users are bogged down by an “excessive” amount of consent windows to communicate their preferences to each app. All of this, plus the lack of any mandatory actions, does not point to the imminent death of App Tracking Transparency. However, the company is awaiting the results of similar regulatory investigations currently taking place in Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania.
App tracking action prompts some concern about retaliatory US fines
The FCA’s decision has raised some concern about retaliatory economic action coming from the United States, where Donald Trump has cozied up to big tech firms during his second term and threatened to retaliate against EU countries using fines as a form of “taxing” US companies. Much of that was triggered by the European Commission’s ongoing investigations into Apple, Google and Meta for potential Digital Markets Act violations. FCA Chairman Benoit Coeure does not feel that this particular fine will draw action, however, noting that the US has a long history of similarly applying antitrust law to Apple (in a series of cases that date back to the prior Trump administration and before) and that the agency has received some word that the present DOJ intends to continue along the same tack.
And while the Digital Markets Act carries potential initial penalties of up to 10% of a company’s global annual turnover, Apple is unlikely to be overly perturbed about the FCA’s app tracking fine. The amount is roughly equivalent to one day’s take for the company, which made $391 billion in revenue in 2024 and reported about $93 billion of profit on the year.
App Tracking Transparency is also broadly popular with consumers, with this antitrust action driven primarily by ad industry forces that would prefer they have less of a say in how their personal information is collected and used online. And though it is true that Apple’s own products are not subject to the app tracking system, most are also not plugged into its advertising ecosystem and the handful that do (such as News) have more fine-grained privacy controls. A prior ruling by Germany’s antitrust authority has established precedent that Apple is within its rights, at least within the EU, to exempt its own apps from App Tracking Transparency.
