Apple Scores legal victory in France over application privacy changes

“We cannot intervene just because there could be a negative impact for companies on the ecosystem,” said Isabelle de Silva, head of France’s competition authority, at a news conference. “At this stage, we have not found any striking examples of discrimination.”

The official said, however, that he plans to conduct an in-depth investigation to determine whether Apple’s changes can be considered “self-preference”, imposing stricter rules on third-party applications than on itself. That investigation could go on until next year, said de Silva.

Wednesday’s decision removes a source of doubt about Apple’s plans, announced last year, to require applications on their smartphones and tablets to obtain permission from users before collecting their advertising identifiers, unique strings of letters and numbers that companies use to identify individuals in order to show them targeted ads and monitor the performance of advertising campaigns.

Privacy advocates and regulators often praise initiatives like Apple’s, saying that consumers should have as much control as possible over how their data is collected and used. In recent years, a push towards greater online privacy has resulted in new laws in Europe and California. But companies in the online advertising ecosystem say these changes put them at a competitive disadvantage.

The companies behind the complaint, filed last fall through a group of trade associations, argued that few Apple users would agree to be tracked, making it harder for apps to make money from personalized ads and hurting companies that broker their sales. .

Damien Geradin, the competition lawyer who represents the coalition of industry groups, said the companies were disappointed by the French decision, but satisfied that the authority was carrying out an in-depth investigation. “Apple is not yet off the hook,” said Geradin.

Apple applauded the decision and said it would work with the authority in its investigation. “We firmly believe that user data belongs to them and that they must control when that data is shared and with whom,” said an Apple spokesman.

The French regulator’s decision comes as tech giants, including Apple, Alphabet Inc.’s

Google, Amazon.com Inc.

and Facebook Inc.

they are under increasing scrutiny in Europe and the United States – both for antitrust reasons for treating minor rivals, and for privacy reasons, for their collection of users’ personal information.

Wednesday’s decision is the first major to highlight how this effort to protect user privacy may conflict with regulators’ efforts to protect online competition. This is because one of the most popular business models in technology is to target advertising to individuals based on their online behavior, and smaller companies sometimes accuse giants of using privacy as a pretext to cut the data they need to do so. .

Earlier this month, some companies complained that Google’s plan to stop supporting or using technology that tracks individuals’s browsing behavior for advertising purposes would simply increase Google’s ad monopoly because it already has a lot of data about users of their own properties.

“We are seeing more and more competition issues around privacy and data protection,” said Silva on Wednesday, adding that he had sought advice from France’s privacy regulator, who she said had supported Apple’s plans as good for users and applied in a neutral way.

De Silva said his authority could also investigate Google’s plan to remove tracking technology from its Chrome browser, in the same way as the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

Facebook also attacked Apple’s plan, arguing that it is a domain abuse that would hurt smaller companies. But restricting Apple identifiers would also undermine a strength of Facebook’s business: how it collects data from mobile apps about what people do in apps, what they look for, what they buy, and more.

The complaint that led to Wednesday’s decision focuses on Apple’s decision to present its own language asking users to accept, separate from requests already required by European privacy law.

The complaint also highlighted how Apple was still able to collect data about iPhone users through the use of Apple apps, giving the Cupertino, Calif. Company an unfair advantage over other apps when it sells targeted ads on its own App Store. It is on this last point that the official said he would continue to investigate.

In her press conference, Ms. De Silva said that dominant companies have the right to establish rules for their services, as long as those rules are not anti-competitive or applied unfairly.

“We will be very vigilant,” said Ms. De Silva.

Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected]