A former senior official at the Competition and Markets Authority has filed a £2bn claim against Apple at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on behalf of thousands of app developers, alleging that the company’s implementation of its app tracking privacy rules was unfair and caused them financial losses.
The claim was brought by Ann Pope, who was senior director of the CMA’s antitrust division for ten years. It alleges that when Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework in 2021, it imposed stricter privacy requirements on third-party app developers than on its own services.
ATT requires third-party iOS apps to ask for a user’s permission before tracking their activity across other companies’ apps and websites. The policy has drawn regulatory scrutiny in Europe over claims that Apple’s own apps were treated more favourably.
The double consent allegation
According to the claim, third-party developers had to secure what the claimants describe as “double consent”, with users asked to agree both to the app’s own data protection policy and to Apple’s ATT prompt. Some reports suggested that opt-out rates from tracking in third-party apps reached as high as 80 per cent after the policy came in.
Apple did not require users to consent under ATT for its own apps, on the basis that they were all part of the same entity. The claimants allege this gave Apple’s advertising ecosystem a “competitive advantage” because it had access to more customer data.
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