Apple is accused in France of not following its own privacy rules

For years, Apple has earned a reputation as possibly the only major technology company with a semi-decent set privacy practices. But a new complaint pressed against the company, claims that some of Apple’s most recent moves are less about privacy and more about gaining an edge over its competitors – a claim that Apple quickly rejected.

This is according to the French lobbying group France Digitale, which told Bloomberg who was filing 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, that pushes the interests of startups and venture capitalists, despite the Cupertino giant’s recent mandate requiring third-party developers To obtain user consent before tracking and targeting, Apple’s own targeted ad delivery systems do this by default, without the need for consent.

An Apple spokesman told Bloomberg in a statement that the allegations made by France Digitale they are “patently false” and basically boil down to “an unsatisfactory attempt by those who track users to divert attention away from their own actions”.

While targeted advertising may not be something we think about when we hear the word “Apple”, the company actually has its own targeted ad setup on people’s iPhones and iPads. These ads are served specifically on App Store, in Apple News, or – strangely – within Apple dedicated Stocks app.

Per Apple’s own privacy policies, running ads on these different services requires a little bit of “contextual information” about your Apple account, such as the type of your device, the language you set up your device for, or your mobile carrier.

Apple’s targeted advertising business itself is not widely talked about – not even by Apple. In many ways, this makes sense; the company is currently in a very heated battle with other giants in the adtech industry, most notably Facebook, about some of its not-so-friendly updates for ads for iOS 14. One of the basic principles of the mobile operating system is a feature known as App Tracking Transparency (or ATT, for short) that you can read everything about on here. In short, ATT requires third parties apps like Facebook to ask users for permission before tracking them across the different apps and services they use.

But, as France Digitale’s claim states, Apple’s ad serving systems themselves are not required to comply with these ATT provisions, allowing Apple to track and target iOS users by default – no permission required. The lobby group summarized by telling Bloomberg that iOS users “are not sufficiently informed about the use and processing of their personal data”.

Yet, as Apple pointed out, its own ad serving systems are not designed to track users across multiple applications, which is the behavior that ATT was designed to contain in the first place. Instead, the company claims that Apple’s personalized ads are targeted based on broad categories, such as the country or city they live in, their age or gender. Apple also allows users to directly change the company’s ability to serve these types of personalized ads directly in your iPhone settings.