Germany demands Apple revise app consent prompts

United States tech giant Apple is set to revise the policies that govern third-party developers' use of personal data for ad targeting on iPhones and iPads, Germany's competition watchdog said on Monday, concluding a multiyear probe.

Germany's Federal Cartel Office determined that Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework, or ATT, gave its own applications an unfair competitive advantage by using more favorable, less discouraging language and design than those required for third-party developers.

The FCO said these more favorable consent prompts potentially breached competition law.

Apple has four months from the date of the decision to roll out the changes, which will remain in effect for seven years under the oversight of an independent trustee, Reuters reported.

"Apple is allowed to provide for a level of protection for its users that exceeds the minimum legal requirements," Andreas Mundt, president of the FCO, said in a statement.

"However, if Apple sets up additional rules within its ecosystem for the use of data, these rules must, under Germany's special abuse provision for large digital companies, not treat its own offerings better than those of its competitors.

"This is precisely where our competition concerns arose," he said. "Apple will now align the consent requests much more closely and give third-party app providers more freedom to combine the necessary requests in a sensible way."

Under the commitments, third-party apps' consent pop-ups must be redesigned to remove discouraging wording and symbols and be presented in a visually and linguistically neutral form. The changes will apply in almost all European Union countries.

"While we believe the current ATT prompt provides a clear, easy-to-understand and effective way to keep users in control of their data — an opinion shared by the German data protection authorities — we have agreed to make changes to the text and formatting of the prompt at the FCO's request," Apple said in a statement.

"These commitments ensure we can continue to provide this important privacy tool in Europe, and keep users, not ad tech companies and data brokers, in control of their data," it said.

Initial fix rejected

Apple had previously proposed a fix that mostly amounted to tweaking the wording of the first-run warning prompts shown in third-party apps. Regulators rejected that proposal, but now the German authority said it has secured binding commitments from Apple and closed the case.

Third-party app developers, such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms, seek precise user data to display targeted ads, which typically yield higher returns than broad, untargeted campaigns.

Regulators in France and Italy have already penalized Apple for its ATT framework, issuing fines of 150 million and 98.6 million euros ($174 million and $114 million), respectively.

jonathan@mail.chinadailyuk.com