France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking

It's anti-competitive. Apple owns the platform and is giving preference to it's own apps on that platform. Every non-Apple app that competes with an Apple app is harmed.

You might be ok with it, but the regulators want Apple to treat third parties the same way they treat their own apps, and that's a good thing. Either everyone would generate two prompts, or no one, but excluding yourself is just favoritism.

It doesn't really matter if you are "fine" with their anti-conpetitive behavior. They should comply to regulations properly.

And if it weren't a dominos app, but an otherwise identical or better third party app? Which through this now has a disadvantage compared to Apples app. Making it worse (regardless of how small or large that downside is) compared to whatever Apple offers, not because of having the worse product in the category, but because Apple also happens to own the otherwise unrelated operating system.

I don't think the Camera app asks for permission to use the Camera.

You could argue that choice is questionable because Apple needs to follow its own rules, but also .. it is the Camera app. I think if you don't want the Camera app to use the Camera you probably should not have opened the app at all.

ATT (App Tracking Transparency) is the dialog that says something like "Facebook would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. Your data will be used to ... $AppProvidedExcuseHere." with "Allow Tracking" and "Ask App Not To Track" buttons.

ATT is the First consent.

The SECOND consent this case is about is the in-app consent that needs to happen according to French law. I can't give an example of that because I do not live in France but I assume this is probably some horribly designed page inside a French app that asks you to share your data with the ad surveilance industry.

Are you also okay with Apple only asking once for Apple Advertising and making other advertising ask twice?

I don't mean ads for Apple products. I mean the ads that Apple sells in News, the App Store, where they track your behavior to personalize the ads you see and to see if you ever buy what the ad is selling.

it's not the consumers, it's the competitors. Instead of comparing apples to pizas, compare something like the Notes app compared to a 3rd party notes app. Any web/app dev knows each extra click adds friction and reduces retention, so that extra pop up can be a subtle advantadge to the one who manages the platform.

Domino's?

Yes

This is for system-level permissions. In third-party apps, the app asks whether you want to enable X permission and then you get an OS-level confirmation request. It's not just in Europe.

Likely they'll fall back in Europe to double-prompting as well in system apps.

I'm assuming there are additional GDPR compliance asks in Europe when using apps. If that's the case I don't see how that is Apple's fault. I wish this article was a bit better but after reading a few of them I still don't get what the actual complaint is.

Right.

I'm not sure this is fixable?

Or maybe there is widespread misunderstanding of the requirements in this scenario? But I also thought the rule was tough enough to require verifying that extra consent? Maybe it's not?

Truly confused here.

> The article specifically says that many apps feel like they need additional consent

Are they right about that? Does Apple provide the app with confirmation that the user consented, and if they do, is it legal to rely on that confirmation?

> The article specifically says that many apps feel like they need additional consent which means they have to request it through two channels.

Surely the same argument can be applied to the cookie law - many sites feel like they need consent therefore it's unfair over people who think they only need one prompt.

Worse yet, if you fail to identify and fix it after several attempts, your entire account and all your apps get permanently banned with no feasible recourse.

> I can't find that bit in the article and I haven't heard it before: could you share some more?

The second paragraph has what you want. From the article:

> The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework used by Apple on iPhones and iPads since 2021 makes the use of third-party applications too complex and hurts small companies that rely on advertising revenue ... The system harms "smaller publishers in particular since, unlike the main vertically integrated platforms, they depend to a large extent on third-party data collection to finance their business," the agency said.

Is there another way to interpret this than that the agency wants to protect advertizing and data collection practices by small businesses?

> I can't find that bit in the article and I haven't heard it before: could you share some more?

> The Autorité also found that the rules governing the interaction between the different pop-up windows displayed undermined the neutrality of the framework, causing definite economic harm to application publishers and advertising service providers.

https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/press-release/targ...

“Economic harm to … advertising service providers” says it implicitly.

>One benefits directly while the other doesn't.

That's the exact of cynicism I'm talking about. It doesn't matter whether banning third party was good for users or not, only whether Google (or Mozilla) stood to benefit. This is absolutely toxic because it means objectively good changes get shouted down.

> Plus many people complained.

For what, Firefox?

The advertising industry was who filed the complaint, it wasn’t a bunch of normal users. If the ad industry wasn’t so shitty, I might give them the benefit of the doubt.

You mean this? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

You're completely unaware of the financial shenanigans that US tech does in Europe.

I'll just leave you with the fact that Apple across two decades paid pennies in taxes in Italy (claiming few millions in revenues) because they would have bullshit like Apple Ireland selling Apple Italy iPhones for 1000€s and selling them for 1000€s plus vat.

Meanwhile Apple Ireland was buying those iPhones for the pennies it costs to make them (few hundred $ at best) and thanks to Irish corporate taxes being close to non existent (0.5%) Apple has paid virtually nothing for decades.

If you believe that us European voters love our countries to be subsidized by rich American countries you're out of your mind, but what we dislike is being taken advantage over and over.

You seriously underestimate the size of EU countries' budgets if you think $150M would even register.

Indeed. If they really gave a shit they'd be getting Apple to open up their APIs so we can get data out of Reminders and Notes etc without having to resort to necromancy and hacking...

Apple need one of these https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/

Or WhatsApp not allowing you name contacts unless you gave it access to your entire address book so FB can have your entire FOAF graph.

Yes this practice should really be banned.

It's constantly whinging it's been denied camera access too. I really hate that app but some people I talk to use it.

Apple's recommendation (as posted) actually doesn't look like double consent to me - in fact, their recommendation calls out that it should be treated like a consent form (You shouldn't be able to exit the explanation page, only continue).

App Publishers have instead used the explanation page as a "soft" consent form, so they can bug you later without being disabled at the system level.

In adtech and social media it is a calculated strategy to maximize user compliance.

Where did you get that part from?

> Third-party publishers "cannot rely on the ATT framework to comply with their legal obligations," so they "must continue to use their own consent collection solution," the French agency said. "The result is that multiple consent pop-ups are displayed, making the use of third-party applications in the iOS environment excessively complex."

It's not harder at all. France are just mad that their small advertisers have to ask for permission again which is their own choice.

It still surprises me how far the US has declined in pretty much all qualities of life. But Hacker News still has this sect of a community that despite EU regulations. Ones they crave from American governments.

Like, do we want protections from corporations or to continue to let them stomp on using hopes they become the corporation one day?