German regulator charges Apple with abuse of power over app tracking tool
BERLIN (Reuters) - The German antitrust authority has charged Apple with abusing its market power through its app tracking tool and giving itself preferential treatment in a move that could result in daily fines for the iPhone maker if it fails to change its business practices.
The move follows a three-year investigation by the Federal Cartel Office into Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature, which allows users to block advertisers from tracking them across different applications.
The U.S. tech giant has said the feature allows users to control their privacy but has drawn criticism from Meta Platforms, app developers and startups whose business models rely on advertising tracking.
"The ATTF (app tracking tool) makes it far more difficult for competing app publishers to access the user data relevant for advertising," Andreas Mundt, cartel office president, said in a statement.
Apple defended the feature in an emailed statement to Reuters, adding that it "holds itself to a higher standard than it requires of any third-party developer."
"We ... will continue to constructively engage with the Federal Cartel Office to ensure users continue to have transparency and control over their data," it added.
Apple will be required to address the concerns set out in the German charge sheet or risk further proceedings and daily fines if it fails to do so by the time of a final ruling which could come this year but is more likely to land next year.
The case was triggered by complaints from associations representing publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, their agencies and ad tech firms.
"Today's charges are groundbreaking. Apple's measures had created an artificial opacity in its ecosystem that led to less choice, higher costs for apps, and less protection against ad fraud, all while boosting Apple's revenues from services," said Thomas Höppner, partner at law firm Hausfeld, which represents the complainants.
"For the first time it has been clarified that Apple may not rely on pretextual privacy arguments to massively restrict competition in its favor," he said.
Companies found guilty of breaching Germany's antitrust rules risk fines as much as 10% of their annual turnover.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
13 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Apple WWDC underwhelms fans in a crucial upgrade
Do you know about Asch conformity experiments? Solomon Asch performed them in the 1950s. He invited individuals into the lab and asked them to judge the length of a line. He also placed 6 actors in the same room who were assigned to give the wrong answers so that the ignorant subject could hear them before he provided his own answer. On average, 35% of the subjects followed the opinions of the actors even if their answer was obviously wrong. That is horrifying. What is even worse is that the study has been replicated numerous times. Now, imagine a scenario in which the actors are given money immediately after giving the wrong answer, and the subject can see that too. What would be the percentage of subjects that gave the wrong answer then? Related: Google resolves major privacy issue That study hasn't been done, but I think we are witnessing something similar unfolding in the tech space. Marketing is everything. If artificial intelligence were called "pattern matching and transformation," it would not sound so cool, would it? Alas, there is precisely zero intelligence in AI. It is just pattern matching and transformation. This is why it hallucinates so much. The farther away from its training data the query you give to the AI is, the crazier the reply you'll get. Public companies don't do marketing just for consumers; they also need to attract investors. And when everyone around you starts hyping AI to attract investors, you may find yourself in a dilemma - is it OK to promise something you probably can't deliver? Apple (AAPL) seems stuck in this dilemma but also faces significant pressures outside Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on iPhones not manufactured in the U.S. put Apple under pressure. The company expects tariffs to add $900 million to its costs for the current quarter. I've already written why large language models can't become sentient. But Apple can't afford to say that. They carefully dance around it by occasionally releasing a research paper on AI's limitations, but that usually looks like a jab at the competition. The company's management probably feels like a person in Asch's experiment, except that the actors are the competitors. Rivals promise stuff from science fiction, but that is still attracting investors. Chaos created by unrealistic marketing is real. Microsoft recently invested in an AI company that went bankrupt. The company had no AI but a huge number of humans doing the work. Related: Elon Musk's DOGE made huge mistakes with veterans' programs Anthropic launched its AI blog in June, seemingly planning to show that AI can replace writers. They killed this project after just one week. It looks like AI companies are playing a game of telephone on the inside, and that is how that project got greenlit. More Tech Stocks: Palantir gets great news from the PentagonAnalyst has blunt words on Trump's iPhone tariff plansOpenAI teams up with legendary Apple exec Apple is held to a much higher standard by consumers than other companies. The company can't afford the luxury of delivering subpar products. In a world full of people with crippled attention spans from watching TikTok and YouTube shorts, Apple delivered an hour and a half of pure boredom. I don't have a problem watching long informative videos, but this one wasn't that. Thank you, YouTube, for the video speed settings-a lifesaver. Apple has veered off course due to pressure. Their new design language, Liquid Glass, isn't original. Windows Aero was trendy in 2006. The Linux desktop environment KDE Plasma has featured numerous transparent/glass themes over the last 17 years. Related: Nvidia's latest project may supercharge quantum computing Yes, Apple did it with more polish. But transparency and monochrome icons ruin accessibility. They are cool-looking only if you are a child. You don't have time for distractions if you have work to do. As for the big AI reveal that some people were hoping for, there wasn't one. The best feature they presented was a call translator. I am not sure how many people need it, but those who do will greatly appreciate it. Long-time fund manager Chris Versace, wrote on TheStreet Pro "It is hard to disagree, at least for now, that Apple is taking, as some have called it, a "gap year" on Apple Intelligence, but one of the great advantages the company has is its developer community and that's the core audience for WWDC." Apple used to have a slogan, "Think different." Well, if the company thinks differently, it ain't showing it. Related: Popular cloud storage service might be oversharing your data The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Miami Herald
14 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
ChatGPT's Sam Altman sends strong 2-word message on the future
As the AI boom continues to take over both the tech industry and the news cycle, there's one thing that's for sure: it's scaring a lot of people. AI is a technically complex topic that can be difficult to explain to the average person, but there's one sentiment that isn't hard to explain at all: the concept that AI might take your job. Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter So rather than try to understand AI's capabilities, or why every major tech company from Meta to Google to Nvidia is pouring billions of dollars into developing it, most people are going to zero in on the part that's personally applicable to them. Related: Cathie Wood has a bold take on AI stealing your job Some voices in the tech space have tried to present an opposite take on the whole "AI making you jobless" rhetoric. Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood said in a recent tweet, "History shows that new technologies create many more jobs than they displace. We do not think that this time will be different." OpenAI's Sam Altman is easily the AI movement's biggest figurehead, thanks to ChatGPT's runaway success. The company hit three million paid ChatGPT subscribers as of June. This proves that people are flocking to it in droves - and away from search engines. Research firm Gartner has even predicted that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%. Now Altman has penned a blog post addressing the topic of AI and how it's changing our world. It's a refreshing take that, for once, will give you some hope about the future of your career. Altman's post emphasizes that compared to any time that has come before, the 2030s can be described with two powerful words: "wildly different." Altman offers a reality check, saying, "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far, it's much less weird than it seems like it should be." "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out," he continued. More Tech Stocks: Palantir gets great news from the PentagonAnalyst has blunt words on Trump's iPhone tariff plansOpenAI teams up with legendary Apple exec The OpenAI CEO doesn't hesitate to say that his company has recently built systems that are "smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them." Altman also says ChatGPT is "already more powerful than any human who has ever lived," a phrase that may feel threatening to some, considering that LLMs are not human to begin with. But Altman sees even more ahead, predicting that AI will significantly mold our future. Related: Microsoft has good news for Elon Musk, bad news for Sam Altman "In the 2030s, intelligence and energy - ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen -are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else." Altman also acknowledged that, yes, many jobs will go away as AI continues to evolve, but that won't be the end of the story. "The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything," he says. "There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand, the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we'll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won't adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big." Altman also points out a key asset of humanity that AI cannot duplicate, saying, "People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don't care very much about machines." Related: OpenAI teams up with legendary Apple exec The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Australian regulator cracks down on 'finfluencers' over unlawful financial advice
(Reuters) -Australia's corporate regulator said on Thursday it had issued warnings to a number of social media "finfluencers", accusing them of offering misleading financial advice and promoting high-risk investment products to their followers. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission warned that the accounts often provided deceptive information and flagged it had sent notices to 18 social media "finfluencers" who were not licensed to provide financial advice. The action was taken as part of the Global Week of Action Against Unlawful Finfluencers held last week, which saw regulators from around the world using regulatory and enforcement powers against unlawful financial influencers. Measures against such illegal activity included arrests, warning notices, website takedowns, and alerts to consumers of the risks of unauthorised and misleading finfluencer content. ASIC said it is concerned that consumers could be harmed by finfluencers providing unauthorised financial product advice and promoting high-risk, complex investment products, such as contracts for difference (CFDs) and over the counter (OTC) derivative products. If a finfluencer is not licenced, an authorised representative or exempt, they are legally not permitted to carry on a business of providing investment business in Australia, the regulator said. ASIC along with market regulators from the UK, United Arab Emirates, Italy, Hong Kong and Canada took coordinated actions against such unauthorised finfluencers. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
