Advertising: Apple is the target of a complaint filed with the CNIL

This is a small thorn in the side of the Tech giant. France Digitale, an association which represents the interests of 1,800 French entrepreneurs and investors, has decided to initiate proceedings against Apple before the CNIL. The organization is convinced that the Cupertino company has not respected the European rules in force regarding advertising.

Concretely, the Apple brand is accused, as part of the deployment of iOS 14, of having automatically collected the consent of its ten million users on advertising targeting. Quoted by our colleagues fromChallenges, Nicolas Brien, general director of France Digitale, explains: “Apple is championing the protection of privacy, we fell off our chairs.”He adds: “the first global stock market valuation to overlook respect for private life, where our startups are monitored daily by the CNIL».

“Apple is taking advantage of its control over the iOS mobile market”

Note that France Digitale decided to join the “Coalition for App Fairness” at the beginning of March, which is fighting against the 30% commission charged on in-app purchases by Apple and Google on their application stores. “Our members tell us that Apple is taking advantage of its control over the iOS mobile market to impose crippling financial conditions on developers, favor its own products over competing applications and deprive consumers of choice (…) We do not tolerate this behavior harmful and anti-competitive»,preciseNicolas Brien.

For its part, Apple reacted to this complaint to Bloomberg:

The allegations in the complaint are blatantly false and will be considered for what they are, a misguided attempt by those tracking users to distract from their own actions and mislead regulators and policymakers. Transparency and control for the user are the pillars of our policy, which is why we have made application tracking transparency equally applicable to all developers, including Apple. Privacy is built into the ads we sell on our no-tracking platform.

Note that Apple is preparing to release as part of iOS 14.5, a new tool which will inform users when an application wants to do tracking in order to better target its advertisements. A feature that worries many companies,dont Facebook, while othersshowed their support.