For the past three years, Apple has faced an antitrust complaint in Germany concerning its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which enables iPhone users to request that applications refrain from tracking their activities across other apps.
Recently, the Bundeskartellamt antitrust authority in Germany released its “preliminary legal assessment,” claiming that the ATT’s exclusive application to third-party apps, while exempting Apple’s own apps, constitutes a violation of antitrust regulations.
The German antitrust authority asserts that Apple imposes different privacy standards on third-party apps compared to its own applications, particularly regarding activity tracking for advertising purposes.
Today, the Bundeskartellamt has communicated its preliminary legal assessment of Apple Inc.’s “App Tracking Transparency Framework” (ATTF) to both Apple Inc. in Cupertino, USA, and Apple GmbH in Munich.
Since the ATTF was introduced in April 2021, app providers in the iOS App Store have been required to obtain additional user consent before accessing certain data for advertising purposes.
However, the stringent requirements of the ATTF only pertain to third-party app developers, excluding Apple itself. According to the Bundeskartellamt’s initial assessment, this may violate specific abuse control provisions for large digital companies (Section 19a(2) of the German Competition Act (GWB)) and the broader abuse control stipulations of Article 102 TFEU.
Apple is now afforded an opportunity to respond to the preliminary findings of the Bundeskartellamt.
In the meantime, App Tracking Transparency has largely ceased to be a significant issue for major advertising platforms, including Facebook. Some suggest that companies like Meta have actually enhanced their advertising effectiveness, empowered by ATT and aided by AI, allowing them to target users more accurately than they could through third-party tracking.
