Apple's App Tracking Transparency treated its own apps better than rivals
bundeskartellamt.de
bundeskartellamt.de
Apple gave itself better dialogs for the permission prompts, which they will now equalize (perhaps just in the EU?) with the prompts they use for their own apps.
My understanding of ATTF is that first-party tracking needed no disclosure other than the information declared in the app's App Store privacy section about the information gathered. If you made a suite of 20 apps, you could track usage across all of them without issue, as long as you didn't also share that info with a third party.
The German regulator settled because the facts are simply on Apple's side. Apple settled because at the end of the day it's no skin off their back if the EU now wants to weaken privacy protections to benefit ad-tech.
EDIT: You can downvote me all you like, but it's right there on page 1 of the FAQ from the regulator. https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Pr...
In contrast, Apple’s own personalised advertising is subject to different conditions. Apple itself does not use the IDFA and cross-company data combination, but draws on user data from its own ecosystem – a wealth of data that is not available, in particular, to the large number of smaller app publishers. This is why Apple is not subject to the requirement of displaying an ATT prompt. Insofar as Apple requests consent to its own processing of user data for advertising purposes, the company uses a different consent prompt – the so-called PA prompt (“Personalized Ads prompt”). The design of the PA prompt differs from that of the ATT prompt for third-party app publishers.
> Apple didn't give itself better dialogs.
On the contrary page two of the FAQ states "The design of the PA prompt differs from that of the ATT prompt for third-party app publishers."
> It never did third-party tracking across across apps or websites
The FAQ strongly implies that they did track across apps and websites, i.e. "draws on user data from its own ecosystem [which involves multiple apps and websites]",
> It also voluntarily showed a dialog explicitly asking you to opt into personalized advertising.
Nothing in the FAQ supports that this was voluntarily and not required by law. In fact it strongly implies the opposite "the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the provisions of the ePrivacy Directive, in particular, require app publishers to obtain user consent for certain types of data processing" ... "Insofar as Apple requests consent to its own processing of user data for advertising purposes,"
> Facebook doesn't show anything similar when you use Instagram or the Facebook app, because that would be undoubtedly bad for business.
Nothing in the FAQ supports this claim, and as discussed in other comments here it is simply false.
> The German regulator settled because the facts are simply on Apple's side. Apple settled because at the end of the day it's no skin off their back if the EU now wants to weaken privacy protections to benefit ad-tech.
Noting in the FAQ supports any of these claims.
The PA prompt is a voluntary (required in the EU?) prompt Apple shows requesting opt-in for personalzied ads. It is of course different from ATT because it doesn't involve third-parties whatsoever.
If Apple wanted, it could mirror Facebook's behavior (in the rest of the world) by not showing any PA prompt. This would greatly increase the number of people who are exposed to personalized ads from Apple's first-party ad network.
>The FAQ strongly implies that they did track across apps and websites, i.e. "draws on user data from its own ecosystem [which involves multiple apps and websites]",
It draws on data from Apple's first-party apps.
>Nothing in the FAQ supports that this was voluntarily and not required by law. In fact it strongly implies the opposite "the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the provisions of the ePrivacy Directive, in particular, require app publishers to obtain user consent for certain types of data processing" ... "Insofar as Apple requests consent to its own processing of user data for advertising purposes,"
My comment refers to Apple and app developer behavior in the rest of the world.
>Noting in the FAQ supports any of these claims.
That is my informed opinion based on following this story since the very beginning.
Your original comment does not distinguish between multiple first and multiple third party apps. This is defending a comment you did not write. Regardless the FAQ you cite does not say whether or not Apple is collecting or aggregating with data from third party apps (just that it is not using the apple specific identifier for advertisers to do so) nor say that not doing so is why the PA prompt is different. And again it does not support your assertion that it is voluntary (in or out of the EU). So again your claim that page 1 of the faq supports all of your original comment is wrong - it supports literally none of it.
> My comment refers to Apple and app developer behavior in the rest of the world.
No, your comment explicitly refers to the behavior of Apple in its interactions with the german regulator, which is its behavior on germany, not the rest of the world.
That is what Apple says about their ad network and what they've said in communications with regulators. And if they were actually doing third-party tracking, that would actually be an instance of Apple being a hypocrite. The regulator would have had them dead to rights if that were the case. The regulator doesn't actually say Apple was doing that.
The quoted section from page 1 indeed says that Apple does not use the IDFA nor uses cross-company combination of data:
>Apple itself does not use the IDFA and cross-company data combination, but draws on user data from its own ecosystem – a wealth of data that is not available, in particular, to the large number of smaller app publishers. This is why Apple is not subject to the requirement of displaying an ATT prompt.
>No, your comment explicitly refers to the behavior of Apple in its interactions with the german regulator, which is its behavior on germany, not the rest of the world.
I wrote my comment and know what I was referring to and I clarified it in later comments. I'm sorry you misunderstood.
It’s a bummer (albeit an expected one) to see Apple reducing the burden for third-party publishers to collect personal data, rather than increasing the burden for themselves to collect it, thus overall raising the floor of user privacy. This is to say, when a regulator requests “everyone be treated equally to ensure competition” maybe they should also take into account how users are impacted and instead request something more nuanced like: if there are unequal standards, they must be equalized in a way that maximizes user benefit.
I also delight in this highlighting Apple's hypocrisy
https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...
Apple, That's Privacy
1. The competition law people are not the data protection people. From the perspective of competition law, they only care that the playing field is leveled, they don't care if you equalize down or up.
2. The EU has fumbled the ball on GDPR by not enforcing it on the tech giants that it was intended to regulate[0], to the point where a tech company enforcing the intent of the law and not the letter of the law feels like singling out competitors.
[0] In particular, the Republic of Ireland is a rotten borough for Facebook, who has all their EU offices there.
Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.
I don't even care if they make the dialogue look a little different since they're system apps you need to use the features of your phone, but the "extras" they support should default to "Ask First" in an ideal world that is.
Maybe you'd like to use a competitor to the Photos app and don't want to use the one Apple provides?
But what does the "Access to photos" permission really do here? It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway. And it's clear, that when you open the Apple Photos app, that it will access your photos.
On the other hand, when you open a third party app, it may not have been clear to you that it wants to access your photos, and the company did not have prior access to them.
I still think apps should only be pre-blessed sparingly. For example, the camera app should not have GPS permission by default, as many people probably aren't aware that camera apps use that information.
"Access to Photos" is a complicated one: Lots of apps only needs this permission when building a custom photo selector. Like Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram do, also Slack.
For every other app, they can use the system's default photo picker and it works without permission.
For example, the "Lunch Receipt Scanner" that my company uses: I'm happy to allow it on my phone, as it saves a lot of time, but I wouldn't want a company app having access to my entire camera roll!!!
I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally. (EDIT: Not saying having a case justifies it, I'm more lamenting the situation)
Main reason I don't use the in-app photo pickers for these but "share" the photo I want to upload from Photos into the app. Zero trust for these companies.
I'm sure he'd love to buy Slack as well
This presumes the OS is something other than a bundle of apps.
Does the filesystem driver have access to your photos stored in the filesystem? Naturally. As would a third party filesystem driver, e.g. if you wanted an app to let you plug a USB drive into your iPad and use NTFS or ext4 filesystems or use various network filesystems.
And then the obvious question is why Apple should be able to give iCloud or its filesystem software access to things the user can't give Dropbox or some open source NFS app permission to do. Or why the user can't deny that permission to the Apple code, or remove it, when they want to use a competitor instead.
The point of having a bundled photo app is to deliver a complete product, not to suppress competition. Imagine the reviews on for a digital camera if you couldn't view photos without downloading extra software.
Apple still makes a commission from app store sales, right? Doesn't bundling a photo app hurt their bottom line by reducing the number of people who feel the need to pay for a 3rd party app?
Ah, it was OpenHaystack: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#installation
Mail plugins are kind of a special case, they're REALLY "legacy", so they work by sharing process memory and being able to access way more than they should, like all your messages, possibly even passwords if the developer is clever enough.
Also notoriously difficult to build, since the Mail internal API breaks from time to time, so they're a rarity these days.
Also notoriously difficult to install.
Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.
The built-in Photos app is just a basic built-in photo viewer. So the user is not allowed to view their own damn photos without clicking through a bunch of permission prompts like they're running Windows Vista.
The app even comes from the same developer as the operating system. If you don't trust that developer to make an app that views your photos, why did you buy a phone that runs that operating system in the first place?!?
Where's the common sense?
Music as well, it's not just an audio player for local tracks, it's upselling a music streaming service.
It kinda seems stupid to have no choice there, or predatory rather, given how the lack of choice is never just coincidental with apple, and it's very much an intentional lock-in first, and then whatever marketing spin second or third. "Privacy, that's iphone ... that's why you should give us access to all of your data, cause you trust us, right? choose yes or yes." Getting suckered into "trusting" something is kind of a pathetic argument regardless of wherever it comes from.
They are doing nothing to stop the endless ads, and the pop-ups in the browser I want to kill turn them off not them grant equal access to have even more ads.
Another problem is the onward, march towards renting leasing, owning nothing endless upgrades for price, in the end I don’t expect a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats to do anything about that. They have been paid off long time ago.
Recently in the last couple of years in particular it’s gotten to be completely out of control. I’m glad I bought a super drive before Apple discontinued it soon the way things are going you won’t even be able to have a large drive or even big memory you’ll be tied to that remote data center…
This is a strange position imo. Why would we expect third party apps written by totally unknown people with unknown goals to have the same permissions as apps written by Apple itself?
Also, I don’t actually know Apple’s developers and their goals.
Purchasing an iPhone self-selects people who are comfortable with the idea of the features it is marketed as having, such as being able to take, store and manipulate photos out of the box.
This is also an issue primarily because there is no third-party photo picker extension point. A third party only gets photo picker support if they store their photos into the Photos library. If third party photo apps could have similar integration points based on them maintaining their own first-party library, they would not need to ask permission to manipulate another program's data store.
I agree that the photo picker should integrate with third-party photo apps just the same.
Currently, the permissions APIs and user experience are designed horribly, and there's a disincentive for Apple to fix it.
Random example: if you write into the photo library, you don't have permission to read back what you wrote. You can't even deep link to that media in the photos app*
*Unless you are Apple.
Considering that ATT was about sharing an identifier to “track across other companies' apps and websites” (text definition of the ATT setting), I don’t believe this ruling is a good move for anyone on informed consent or privacy. In the name of improving competition, sometimes regulators may end up making things worse for users.
...but Meta is exactly the reason why IMO it's needed. Because of people like Zuckerberg who treat the internet and people's phones like his personal plaything. No granularity. Contacts uploaded whenever anyone does the slightest thing
> ... Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.
In the case of operating systems, I simply select a different operating system, and the same principle applies to AI models. It is amusing that Microsoft and Linux are available to consumers, providing them with a choice. However, simply because the decisions made by one or the other are superior/better does not imply that everyone should be reduced to a similar low level.
Apple is not even close to being the dominant operating system or hardware platform, globally, yet you still expect them to be mediocre, akin to most of their competition.
Not if it runs afoul of the law, and I can point out several DOZEN ways Apple's developer T&C violates the law.
Apple needs to get slapped down for anticompetitive practices, first and foremost. After that, they need to be removed from the economy the rest of the way for their constant decades of lying about Apple 'security.' (Remember the "Macs don't get viruses" advertising scheme, despite several viruses for Mac existing and being in the wild at that time?)
Tim Cook himself needs to sit in a prison cell for a while.
The barrier to entry is so high at this point that I fear we’ll never see another real entrant.
Do these regulations meaningfully move the needle? I doubt it. They do mean that you can be a little more competitive against the house within the two existing ecosystems, but if anything they probably raise the barrier for making something truly from scratch.
Great, sounds like a new channel for marketing where I really just want to opt-out. Also, does this added scope include the mechanism to maliciously comply like so many websites do with cookies? (eg: You want our cookies? Here is a list of things you can de-select... with toggles that aren't clearly on or off)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments
> Under the commitments that have now been declared binding, Apple will align the consent prompts for its own offerings and for third-party apps much more closely.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily.
You want to handle device rotation smoothly in your in-app browser?
Tough luck, WebKit's _beginAnimatedResizeWithUpdates is private, and only Apple gets to use it in Safari.
Good luck with the animation and scroll position handling. You better hope WkWebView's default behavior works for you, because you don't get to customize it and fix edge cases or the tab previews, like Apple did for their browser.
There are whole classes of applications that are not possible unless low level device data is exposed via APIs.
And since Apple doesn't provide the apps, the apps won't exist until Apple creates them.
Like let Apple first do the move, flesh out the issues and overall viability and then require them to open the api ?
Sometimes transparency and honesty get weaponized. Especially by actors with centralized power.
(Not arguing against transparency, but against misinterpreting it as always being used in good faith.)
I keep hearing from people that they’re awesome to use so why do people care about the smallest system available worldwide? Why does anyone care what Apple does or anyone else if they decide to make their own operating system?
So whether Apple likes it or not, now their OS is a platform and has different responsibilities compared to your hobby OS that you developed to play with, and accidentally you got 10 users.