France’s antitrust authorities on Monday handed over a fine of 150 million euros (162 million dollars) for their privacy feature of applications, which is also supervised in several other European countries.
Watchdog said that the way Apple implemented its monitoring application software (ATT) “Necessary or required or proportional to the fact of the user data protection company”, and also punished third parties.
With punishment, Apple will have to announce a decision on their website for seven days.
Authorities in Germany, Italy, Romania and Poland have opened similar probes over ATT, which Apple promotes as privacy protection.
The feature that Apple introduced in 2021 requires applications to receive user consent via the jump window before monitoring their activity in other applications and websites.
If they refuse, the application loses access to the user’s advertising identifier, which allows ads aiming.
Critics have accused Apple of using a system to promote their own advertising services, at the same time limiting competitors.
In her decision, the French competitive administration announced that the ATT feature leads to an excessive number of windows for third-party apps on iPhone and iPada, which makes experience more inconvenient.
It also revealed that the Apple system required user to deprive ads monitoring twice, not once, “stabbing the neutrality of the feature” and causing economic damage to the issuers of applications and providers of the ad services.
The authorities added that Apple’s approach disproportionately affects smaller publishers, which largely rely on the collection of third parties to fund their business.
Following the complaints of the advertising industry player who claimed to have interfered with their ability to target users, the French supervisor Watchdog initially refused to impose emergency measures in 2021, but continued the investigation.
This story is originally shown on Fortune.com
