Apple may turn off key privacy tool in Europe

In a victory for surveillance capitalism, Apple may be forced to leave its users in Europe vulnerable to rapacious ad data collection in response to “intense lobbying” by politicians in the region. Apple warns these lobbying efforts mean the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which helps prevent apps from tracking what you do across services and websites for advertising purposes, might need to be disabled. 

Apple may be forced to withdraw ATT

ATT gives people the chance to find out what data firms are collecting about them, forces the companies to openly request permission to do so, and gives users protection when they won’t honor such requests. 

“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers,” Apple said in a statement provided to the German Press Agency.

In Germany, officials say the design of ATT could violate regulations. Apple has proposed various fixes, but these have not been accepted so far — and those that have been suggested by regulators are complex and would undermine ATT. 

It’s hard to imagine who might be behind this intense lobbying effort. Shortly after Apple introduced ATT in 2020, Facebook/Meta began to take out full page ads in which it claimed the feature would be bad for small business. Ad agencies complained, too, presumably because their data broking companies would find it harder to gather data on people. 

“What some companies call ‘personalized experiences’ are often veiled attempts to gather as much data as possible about individuals, build extensive profiles on them, and then monetize those profiles,” Apple wrote in 2020.

The importance of privacy

Apple has always pushed hard on the need for user privacy. Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken about the threat of a surveillance economy and Craig Federighi, Apple’s software vice president, gave an extensive speech on the topic at the European Data Protection and Privacy Conference in 2020.

“The mass centralization of data puts privacy at risk,” he said then, “no matter who’s collecting it and what their intentions might be. So ,we believe Apple should have as little data about our customers as possible.

“Now, others take the opposite approach. They gather, sell, and hoard as much of your personal information as they can. The result is a data-industrial complex, where shadowy actors work to infiltrate the most intimate parts of your life and exploit whatever they can find — whether to sell you something, to radicalize your views, or worse. That’s unacceptable. And the solution has to start with not collecting the data in the first place.”

What Europe says is not what Europe does

Since then, we’ve seen European and other regulators totally ignore Apple’s arguments concerning consumer privacy — sometimes in direct contradiction to GDPR — in favor of nebulous ideas around competition. What that really means is that while they claim to care about privacy with GDPR, they seem happy to subvert it to foster the evolution of a surveillance-based ad economy.

ATT is an important tool to help both empower customers and boost awareness of the need to fight for privacy.

Its existence calls to mind a famous comment from Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, who once said: “I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.”

Choice for billionaires

It’s not the first time Meta seems to have held the day in the EU. Apple has complained that its competitor has attempted to exploit some of the forced changes of the EU’s Digital Markets Act to attempt to exfiltrate user data. Regulators seem to be pretty deaf to that accusation, too, potentially showing the kind of industries they hope to nurture in Europe with the DMA. What isn’t clear is whether those are the kinds of businesses Europeans want them to support — and where is the choice to stick with pure Apple if they want?

“We will continue to urge the relevant authorities in Germany, Italy and across Europe to allow Apple to continue providing this important privacy tool to our users,” Apple said. 

I wish them luck in that struggle.

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