France’s data protection authority, CNIL, fined Apple €8 million (about $8.5 million) Wednesday for illegally harvesting iPhone owners’ data for targeted ads without proper consent.
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The French fine, though, is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that Apple may not be the privacy guardian angel it makes itself out to be.
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Apple failed to “obtain the consent of French iPhone users (iOS 14.6 version) before depositing and/or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their terminals,” the CNIL said in a statement. The CNIL’s fine calls out the search ads in Apple’s App Store, specifically. A French court fined the company over $1 million in December over its commercial practices related to the App Store.
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Eight million euros is peanuts for a company that makes billions a year on advertising alone and is so inconceivably wealthy that it had enough money to lose $1 trillion in market value last year—making Apple the second company in history to do so. The fine could have been higher but for the fact that Apple’s European headquarters are in Ireland, not France, giving the CNIL a smaller target to go after.
Still, its a signal that Apple may face a less friendly regulatory future in Europe. Commercial authorities are investigating Apple for anti-competitive business practices, and are even forcing the company to abandon its proprietary charging cable in favor of USB-C ports.
Source: Apple Faces Rare $8.5M Fine For Illegal Data Harvesting
Robin Edgar
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