Italy’s antitrust agency AGCM said on Thursday it had opened a probe into Apple’s App Store for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the apps market, seemingly focused on Apple’s application of App Tracking Transparency to third party developers vs. its own in-house apps.
The watchdog said Apple penalised third-party app developers by imposing “a more restrictive privacy policy” than it applies to itself, from April 2021.
Furthermore, external app developers are disadvantaged “in terms of the quality of the data made available by Apple,” the AGCM said in its statement.
In an emailed statement to Reuters, Apple said it applies privacy rules “equally to all developers, including Apple”.
According to the Italian watchdog, users of non-Apple apps have more visible and more strongly worded prompts to block data tracking.
MacDailyNews Take: Last June, Germany’s Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office) said it was also looking into Apple’s App Tracking Transparency privacy rules for third-party apps to see whether they give Apple preferential treatment.
As we wrote at the time: “Apple does not track users across third-party apps and websites, selling user tracking data to other companies, which is why Apple apps do not display the App Tracking Transparency prompt to obtain the users’ permission to allow the collection of end user data and the sharing of it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and web sites.”
Apple employs on-device intelligence and other features to minimize the data that the company collects in Apple’s apps, browsers, and online services, and the company does not create a single comprehensive user data profile across all of our apps and services.
More info: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Your_Data.pdf
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The post Italy’s antitrust watchdog probes Apple over alleged App Store abuse appeared first on MacDailyNews.
