Leading French startup association files a privacy complaint against Apple alleging that the latest iOS is collecting users' data without their permission
Chris O'Brien / Sifted :
Context & Ripple Effects
This complaint lands mid-arc in Apple's European privacy fight. Months earlier, Apple had defended its delayed IDFA changes in iOS 14 while attacking Facebook as wanting to 'collect as much data as possible' — casting itself as the privacy referee. Now France Digitale flips that script, arguing the latest iOS collects user data without explicit permission, with the added edge that the complainant is a startup association rather than a big-ad rival like Meta.
What followed shows the complaint mattered: the French watchdog opened an investigation into Apple's personalized ad features within a week, and France judged the IDFA changes themselves not abusive but kept probing whether Apple applies stricter rules to third-party apps than to its own — a thread that ended years later in a €150M antitrust fine over how iOS asks for data consent.
First-order effects
- Apple faces a formal regulatory inquiry from the French data protection authority into its personalized advertising features, forcing it to defend its consent flows rather than just advertise them.
- France Digitale gains standing as an adversarial voice against Apple in Europe, shifting the privacy debate from Facebook-vs-Apple rhetoric toward scrutiny of Apple's own first-party data collection.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and app developers get a potential counterweight to ATT-era restrictions: if regulators conclude Apple polices third-party apps more strictly than its own services, the asymmetry becomes actionable rather than just complained about.
- Facebook and other ad-dependent players benefit indirectly — every regulatory finding that Apple's first-party collection resembles what it criticized weakens Apple's moral high ground in the IDFA standoff.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Europe moves from accepting platform-authored privacy rules to enforcing symmetric ones — the same self-preferencing logic that ran from this complaint through France's investigation to the eventual fine.
- Consent prompts become a regulated interface, not a design choice: how iOS asks users for data turns into a matter of antitrust and data-protection law rather than product policy.
The trend: European regulators are converting privacy complaints against platform gatekeepers into binding enforcement, targeting not just data collection itself but whether platforms hold their own services to the rules they impose on others.