Apple Accused of Double Standards in Tracking iPhone Users’ Activity

Apple has been the subject of an antitrust case in Germany for three years now over the opaque operation of the App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATTF). This feature allows iPhone owners to request apps not to track them. The Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) accuses Apple of only applying the ATTF to third-party apps and not to Apple apps, which violates antitrust policy.

In a press release today, the German antitrust authority claims that Apple applies a different privacy standard to third-party apps than to its own, especially when it comes to tracking user activity for advertising. Since the implementation of the ATTF in April 2021, iOS apps distributed in the App Store must request additional consent from users in order to track their activity and access certain data.

However, according to the Bundeskartellamt, the ATTF’s strict requirements only apply to third-party app providers, not to Apple itself. The antitrust authority believes that this approach should be prohibited under the special abuse control provisions for large digital companies in the German Competition Act (GWB) and the general abuse control provisions in Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Meanwhile, ATTF is essentially a non-issue for large advertising apps like Facebook✴. Meta✴ has even improved its advertising capabilities by taking advantage of ATTF, partly through AI, to better target users.