App Tracking

Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy

App Store, App Tracking, Apple, competition law, italy, personalized advertising, Policy, privacy policy / DJ Henderson / December 22, 2025

Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store.

In a press release, the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same data collection.

Requiring such “double consent” was “extremely burdensome” and “harmful” to some developers—especially the smallest developers, the regulator said. Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue after the policy was introduced, as users increasingly declined to opt into personalized ads.

Meanwhile, Apple may have benefited from the ATT restricting developers’ ad revenues, either “in the form of higher commissions collected from developers through the App Store and, indirectly, in terms of the growth of its own advertising service.” Since ATT was adopted, “revenues from App Store services increased,” the regulator said, as developers paid higher commissions and “likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads.”

Without intervention, Apple would continue requiring third-party developers to provide an additional consent screen, which was “found to be disproportionate to the achievement of the company’s stated data protection objectives,” the press release said.

“Apple should have ensured the same level of privacy protection for users by allowing developers to obtain consent to profiling in a single step,” the regulator concluded.

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“MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web

Searls and his group are putting up the standards and letting the browsers, extension-makers, website managers, mobile platforms, and other pieces of the tech stack craft the tools. So long as the human is the first party to a contract, the digital thing is the second, a “disinterested non-profit” provides the roster of agreements, and both sides keep records of what they agreed to, the function can take whatever shape the Internet decides.

Terms offered, not requests submitted

Searls’ and his group’s standard is a plea for a sensible alternative to the modern reality of accessing web information. It asks us to stop pretending that we’re all reading agreements stuffed full with opaque language, agreeing to thousands upon thousands of words’ worth of terms every day and willfully offering up information about us. And, of course, it makes people ask if it is due to become another version of Do Not Track.

Do Not Track was a request, while MyTerms is inherently a demand. Websites and services could, of course, simply refuse to show or provide content and data if a MyTerms agent is present, or they could ask or demand that people set the least restrictive terms.

There is nothing inherently wrong with setting up a user-first privacy scheme and pushing for sites and software to do the right thing and abide by it. People may choose to stick to search engines and sites that agree to MyTerms. Time will tell if MyTerms can gain the kind of leverage Searls is aiming for.