One pop-up, two standards. That's the core allegation in this lawsuit: Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy, rolled out in 2021, was designed with wording meant to discourage users from consenting to tracking—but the design was less friendly to third-party developers than to Apple's own apps.
According to Reuters, a former official at the UK's antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), is suing Apple on behalf of app developers for £2 billion (roughly $2.7 billion). The lawsuit alleges that the ATT policy gave Apple's own advertising ecosystem an unfair advantage, since the consent flow faced by outside developers was designed to make it easier for users to reject tracking compared to Apple's own services.
Apple's response to Reuters was that the company is "held to the exact same rules as all developers."
But that claim hasn't held up so well with European regulators lately. Germany's Federal Cartel Office concluded in an investigation last month that Apple's ATT pop-up used for its own apps "could encourage users to consent, while the version used for third-party apps could discourage consent." That finding led Apple to agree to adjust how ATT operates within the EU.
This isn't the first time Apple has paid a price over ATT in Europe. The French Competition Authority already fined Apple €150 million (about $175 million) last year, also over how the ATT policy was implemented. Regulators in France, Italy, and Poland have all opened investigations into the policy as well.
When ATT launched, Apple framed it as giving users more control over how much their behavior gets tracked across apps. Four years later, the very mechanism meant to protect user privacy has instead become a recurring focus of scrutiny for Apple across multiple jurisdictions. As for how this UK lawsuit will play out, there's no further public information yet.
