After getting Apple fined by the French government over antitrust allegations, advertisers hoped to get App Tracking Transparency tools changed or removed, but a court has ruled in Apple's favor.

App Tracking Transparency debuted in 2021 and advertisers around the world immediately sought ways to undermine it. In 2023, a French advertising group took legal action and Apple was ultimately fined by the competition authority.

According to a report from La Tribune, the advertising coalition sought further penalties beyond the fine, and has lost. The group asserted that the feature ruined their ability to target ads at users and resulted in a shortfall of "nearly 50%."

The coalition of French advertisers consisted of Alliance Digitale, IAB France, GESTE, MMA France, SRI, and UDECAM. The privacy-focused feature prompts users if they'd like to allow an app to track them across other apps and websites, and it has proven to be quite popular for users to disallow tracking.

"We welcome the court's decision that rejects these unfounded allegations," Apple said in a statement. "This feature has been widely adopted by our users and hailed by privacy advocates as well as by data protection authorities around the world, including in France. We will continue to support strong protections for the privacy of our users."

It seems that advertisers hoped that Apple would get penalized for using its platform to help users block privacy-invasive tactics. Instead, since no preferential treatment was found by investigations, providing user choice in the matter has won out.

There is a toggle in Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Tracking that lets users stop the prompts entirely. Toggle "Allow Apps to Request to Track" off and you'll never be prompted or tracked, not even by Apple's apps. The kicker here is that Apple doesn't rely on user data for its business model and is unaffected by the lack of tracking.

The French investigation uncovered more details, such as Meta's attempts to avoid App Tracking Transparency and its exaggerations about ad performance. Of all the companies involved, App Tracking Transparency appears to have hit Meta the hardest.

It is unclear if the advertisers will seek an appeal or other recourse.