App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is an Apple privacy initiative intended to allow iPhone owners greater control over how developers collect and use their data. However, the company was accused of treating its own apps more favourably than third-party ones.
The problem for Apple was that the company applied these rules to third-party developers without displaying the same permission prompt within its own iPhone apps. The regulator agreed that Apple was taking an unfair approach, and TNW reports that the iPhone maker has now agreed to make changes. Because it doesn’t carry out the kind of tracking ATT was intended to control, but Apple’s continued expansion of its ad sales business certainly led some to question this. (As an aside, a recent poll showed that almost all 9to5Mac readers think Apple should exit the ad business .) Earlier this year, German publishers urged the antitrust regulator to hold Apple to the same standard as third-party developers, the company argued that this is.
Developers will also be allowed to combine Apple’s mandatory tracking request with their own data-protection prompt, rather than putting users through two separate hurdles that Apple’s own apps could quietly sidestep. Apple has four months to do so, and its compliance will be monitored for a seven-year period.
