Apple softens the tracking-consent prompt for apps in the EU
Apple will let apps in the European Union ask for permission to track users with a softer screen. From iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers distributing in the EU can replace the App Tracking Transparency prompt that has appeared since 2021 with an alternative version: a full page rather than a pop-up, no word "track" anywhere on it, buttons that read "Allow" and "Reject" instead of "Allow" and "Ask App Not to Track", different colours and layout, and an optional "Additional Information" link where the app explains why it wants to link what it learns about you with what other companies know. In Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Romania the old prompt will not be available at all. Apps may also ask again one year after a refusal. The change closes a Bundeskartellamt case that Apple settled with binding commitments on 17 August, and follows fines of 150 million euros in France and 98.6 million in Italy over the same framework. Apple's own privacy setting is being renamed too: "Allow Apps to Request to Track" becomes, in the EU, "Allow Apps to Request to Link Your Activity Across Companies".
In brief
- The rule about when an app must ask does not change; what changes is how the question looks, what it is called and how often it can be repeated. TechCrunch counted more than half a dozen modifications, all in the direction of making the screen less alarming.
- The regulators' case was not about privacy but about self-preference: Apple's own apps collect data across its ecosystem for personalised ads with a friendlier consent screen than the one it imposes on everyone else. Germany found the difference "exceeded what could be justified".
- Andreas Mundt, the Bundeskartellamt's president, says the aim is "expressly not" higher consent rates but a free and informed choice either way. The advertising and media associations admitted to the case wanted Apple's extra layer gone entirely; they got a neutral one instead.
- For a user the practical lever is unchanged and worth knowing: with the global switch off in Settings, apps cannot show the prompt or the annual re-prompt, whatever the screen looks like. It is the same device-level consent logic iOS 27 uses for Siri training data.
What the new prompt does differently
Since iOS 14.5 in April 2021, any app that wants to read the device's advertising identifier or otherwise link your activity to data from other companies has had to show Apple's dialog: "Allow [app] to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?", with "Ask App Not to Track" as the first choice. Most people tapped that, and the ad industry has been litigating the screen ever since. The EU version that arrives with iOS 27.2 keeps the trigger and the timing, and changes the presentation. Apple's developer documentation describes "modified formatting and language", a full-screen layout, an "Additional Information" text button that opens the developer's own explanation of why it wants to "link user or device data collected from your app with user or device data collected from other companies' apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, or to share user or device data with a data broker". That last sentence is the legal definition of tracking, now printed on a screen that no longer uses the word. The buttons become "Allow" and "Reject". And a developer may re-prompt an EU user one year after the previous answer, "regardless of whether that choice was to accept or reject", unless the user has disabled prompts globally. In the five countries where competition authorities have acted, Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Romania, only the new version can be shown; elsewhere in the EU it is the developer's choice.
Why a competition regulator redesigned a privacy screen
The Bundeskartellamt's release is careful to say that its proceeding "did not aim at enforcing data protection law" and that Apple "is allowed to provide for a level of protection for its users that exceeds the minimum legal requirements". The problem was the asymmetry. Under Section 19a of the German Competition Act, the special regime for companies of "paramount significance for competition across markets", a gatekeeper that writes extra rules for its ecosystem may not apply them more gently to itself. Apple's apps ask for consent to personalised advertising with their own wording and design; third-party apps had to use Apple's, which in the regulator's preliminary view had "the potential to discourage consent", and sometimes had to ask twice, once for GDPR and once for Apple. The commitments align the two, strip "possibly discouraging symbols and wording", let publishers explain their business model, and allow the Apple prompt to be combined with the GDPR consent so users are not asked the same thing in sequence. France's Autorité de la concurrence reached the same conclusion with a fine in March 2025, Italy's AGCM followed, and Poland and Romania have proceedings of their own, which is why those five markets lose the old screen outright. Mundt's quote is the honest summary of the compromise: the regulator does not want more people to say yes, it wants the no and the yes to be equally easy. Whether a full-page dialog without the word "track" and with a "Reject" button achieves that, or shifts the balance toward the people who paid for the litigation, is the empirical question the next year of opt-in rates will answer.
What to do on your own iPhone
None of this touches the master switch. In Settings, under Privacy & Security and then Tracking, the toggle "Allow Apps to Request to Track", renamed in the EU to "Allow Apps to Request to Link Your Activity Across Companies", governs whether any app may show the prompt at all. Apple's documentation states that a user who has disabled it "cannot be re-prompted", which makes it the one setting that survives the redesign and the annual retry. Two other toggles matter for the same reason the regulators cared: Apple's own personalised ads live under Privacy & Security, Apple Advertising, Personalized Ads, and are on by default; and the Siri training consent that iOS 27 asks for at first launch follows the same logic of a device-wide switch that the app-level screen cannot override. For everything an app can learn without the identifier, the operating system keeps its own records, as we showed for the desktop last week. The redesigned prompt will be softer, it will come back yearly, and in five countries it will be the only one you see; whether you see it at all is still your decision, made once, in Settings.
