Apple has built its entire brand identity around privacy. So it’s awkward when regulators keep finding that its most celebrated privacy feature may have been quietly rigged in Apple’s favor.
A former official with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has filed a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, as reported by Engadget. The core claim is straightforward: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy held third-party developers to stricter standards than Apple applied to its own services, giving Apple’s advertising business an unfair structural advantage.
Apple, for its part, told Reuters it was “bound by the exact same requirements as all developers.” That’s the standard denial. But regulators across Europe have been pulling at this thread for years, and what they’ve found isn’t flattering.
ATT launched in 2021 with a simple pitch: give users control over cross-app tracking. Every app had to ask permission before tracking you. In theory, that sounds great for users. In practice, investigators found the pop-up language Apple used for its own apps was subtly different from what third-party developers were required to show. Germany’s Federal Cartel Office concluded last month that Apple’s own ATT prompts had the potential to encourage user consent, while third-party prompts were worded in ways likely to discourage it. That’s not a neutral privacy feature. That’s a design choice that shapes user behavior, and it happens to benefit Apple’s ad business every single time.
France’s competition authority fined Apple €150 million over ATT last year. Italy and Poland have also launched investigations. And now Apple has agreed to make changes to how ATT operates in the European Union, which is telling. Companies don’t agree to change things they believe were fine to begin with.
This matters well beyond the lawsuit itself. Apple has spent years positioning ATT as a principled stand against Big Tech surveillance. Meta lost billions in ad revenue after ATT rolled out, and Apple’s own advertising business grew significantly in the same period. Whether that’s correlation or something more deliberate is exactly what courts and regulators are now being asked to decide.
The broader pattern here is one privacy watchers should take seriously. Privacy features that happen to disadvantage competitors while protecting or growing the company’s own revenue streams deserve scrutiny, regardless of how they’re marketed. “Privacy” is not automatically a public good when the company controlling the rules is also a direct competitor to everyone subject to them.