Earlier this year, it was reported that regulators in France were likely to investigate Apple for unfairly using its position as App Store operator to negatively affect advertising companies. Now the French Competition Authority has formally notified Apple of the investigation.
The complaint was initially issued by four French advertising trade groups. They believe that Apple unfairly cut off user data collection that powered the advertising industry. New today is an official response by the French Competition Authority [machine learning translated]:
Apple is accused of abusing its dominant position by implementing discriminatory, non-objective and non-transparent conditions for the use of user data for advertising purposes.
This act of investigation opens the contradictory procedure and allows the exercise of the rights of the defence. It cannot prejudge the guilt of the company that received a notification of grievances. Only the instruction conducted in a contradictory manner, in compliance with the rights of the defence of the company concerned, will allow the college to determine, after exchanges of written observations and after an oral session, whether or not the grievance is well founded.
The move kicks off a new round of regulatory procedures that Apple will need to fight in France. In a statement to Bloomberg, Apple responded to the development by pointing out that regulators have favorably viewed its data protection policies in the past:
“App Tracking Transparency gives users more control by requiring all apps to ask permission before tracking them. We have previously received strong support from regulators and privacy advocates on the goal of ATT.”
Follow our continuing coverage of App Tracking Transparency here.
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