France Fines Apple €150 Million over App Tracking Transparency

What Changed

The decision by France's competition authority, the Autorité de la concurrence, covered how Apple implemented App Tracking Transparency (ATT) between April 2021 and July 2023.¹

The case started in October 2020, when advertising associations complained ahead of ATT's launch. In March 2021 the authority declined to impose interim measures, but continued investigating.²

Its decision found that ATT's objective, protecting users' privacy, was not a problem in itself.¹ The problem was how it was implemented, which the authority said was neither necessary for nor proportionate to that objective:

• Multiple pop-ups. ATT's consent didn't satisfy French data protection law, so apps still had to show their own consent prompts. Users saw several pop-ups, which the French data protection authority, the CNIL, said made third-party apps excessively complex to use.
• Asymmetric rules. Refusing tracking took one tap, but accepting it had to be confirmed a second time, which the authority said undermined the framework's neutrality.
• Harm to smaller publishers. Unlike large, vertically integrated platforms, smaller publishers depend heavily on third-party data to fund their businesses, so ATT penalized them in particular.

Other European Cases

France was not alone. Italy's competition authority fined Apple €98.6 million in December 2025, finding that the "double consent" ATT creates, Apple's prompt plus the app's own consent request, was disproportionate; Apple said it would appeal.³

In Germany, the Bundeskartellamt closed its case in August 2026 after Apple agreed to make the prompts shown for other developers' apps visually and linguistically neutral, and to let developers combine Apple's prompt with their own consent request.⁴ Apple has four months to make the changes, and a trustee will monitor them for seven years. Reports differ on whether the changes apply only in Germany or across most of the EU. Investigations in Poland and Romania are under way.⁵

Why It Mattered

It was the first competition ruling against how Apple's tracking prompt was implemented. It didn't require Apple to remove ATT, and the authority accepted that privacy protection was a legitimate goal. But it established that a dominant platform's privacy rules must be applied neutrally, and can't place heavier burdens on others than on itself.

That principle matters for every later Apple change, including the iOS 27 block list, where questions have already been raised about which companies are blocked and which are not.