Apple moving forward with plan to limit “creepy” user tracking - Ars Technica

Apple's plan to add a new privacy feature to iOS to limit "invasive, even creepy" tracking by third-party firms is nothing but an abuse of market power to stifle competition, Facebook—a third-party tracking firm extraordinaire—claims.

Apple stands behind its plan to implement the new app tracking transparency (ATT) feature next year and plans to move forward with it, Jane Horvath, senior director of global privacy at Apple, said in a letter to eight civil, human, and digital rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first- and third-party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products ...

They claim it's about privacy, but it's about profit.

That said, Facebook is far from the only entity to allege that Apple is unfairly abusing its power to push out third-party firms.

"While privacy matters and needs to be protected, privacy rhetoric cannot be used as a fig leaf to justify anti-competitive practices that will destroy the mobile ad ecosystem while benefiting Apple," a lawyer representing the coalition said at the time.

Here in the US, Apple is embroiled in a high-drama legal fight with Epic Games, which alleged in an August antitrust lawsuit that Apple is "the behemoth seeking to control markets, block competition, and stifle innovation." Epic in September became one of the founding members of a new trade group, the "Coalition for App Fairness," which seeks to force Apple to change its "exploitative" app store practices.

A congressional investigation that concluded in October agreed with the complaints, finding that Apple ties its in-app payments system and its app store together in an anticompetitive way and that the company also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to hurt third-party competitors.

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