Apple is accused in France of not complying with its own privacy rules

Apple has for years earned the reputation of being the only major technology company with a semi-decent set of privacy practices. But a new complaint against the company claims that some of Apple’s recent actions are less about privacy and more about acquiring its competitors – an allegation that Apple quickly rejected.

This is according to the French lobby group France Digitale, which told Bloomberg that he should file a complaint with the country’s data authority – the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, or CNIL for short – about Apple’s own targeted advertising business. According to the lobby group, driving the interest of startups and venture capitalists, despite the recent mandate of the Cupertino giant to require third-party developers obtain permission from users before they locate and target, Apple’s own targeted advertising systems do this by default, no permission required.

An Apple spokesman told Bloomberg in a statement that the allegations were made by France Digital ‘apparently false’, and amounts to a poor attempt by those who track users to infer from their own actions. ‘

While targeted advertising may not be something we think of when we hear the word “Apple”, the company does have its own targeted ad setup about people’s iPhones and iPads. These ads are offered specifically within the App Stear, on Apple News, or – oddly enough – within Apple’s dedicated stock app.

Per Apple’s own privacy policy, to run ads in these different services, requires some “contextual information” about your Apple account, such as your device type, the language in which your device is set up, or your mobile service provider.

There’s not much talk about Apple’s own targeted advertising business, not even by Apple. In many ways it makes sense; the company is currently in a pretty fierce battle with other giants in the adtech industry, especially Facebook, about some of his not-so-ad-friendly updates on iOS 14. One of the core principles of the mobile operating system is a feature known as App Tracking Transparency (or ATT for short) that you can read all about here. In a nutshell, ATT needs third party apps like Facebooks to ask permission from users before watching them in the various apps and services they use.

But as France’s Digital Complaint claims, Apple’s own advertising systems do not have to comply with these ATT terms, and allow Apple to track and target standard iOS users – no permission required. The lobby group summed it up by telling Bloomberg that iOS users were “insufficiently informed about the use and processing of his personal data.”

HoweverAs Apple has pointed out, its own advertising systems are not designed to track users across multiple applications. This is the behavior that ATT designed to limit in the first place. Instead, the company says that Apple’s personalized ads are targeted at broad categories, such as the country or city in which they live, their age or gender. Apple also allows users directly with the company’s ability to offer these types of personalized ads are direct their iPhone settings.