The French competition authority claims that Apple’s practices might have affected “several related markets for advertising services.”

The Tame Apple press has done its best to play down the action, claiming it is the first major governmental act against the US tech giant over its advertising rules. This ignores the fact that Germany, Italy and Poland have opened similar probes, it is just that France came out with a ruling first.

The French say that the App Tracking Transparency compels developers to ask for user permission if they plan on “tracking” their movements from app to app, a common tactic to build a user’s digital profile and target them with personalised ads.

Such “tracking” techniques rely on capturing the user’s “identifier for advertisers”, or IDFA, a string of digits comparable to a social security number. Apple announced the move in 2020, prompting claims in the $400 billion digital ad industry that it was an “IDFA apocalypse”.

Facebook estimated it had lost as much as $10 billion in annual revenue in 2022 because of Apple’s change in policy.

France’s competition authorities, which will investigate the grievance claims, labelled the rules “discriminatory” and “non-transparent”.

Apple disputed the allegations, saying it holds its own advertising business “to a higher standard of privacy than it requires of any other developer”.

However, the tech group’s ownership of the hardware, operating system and App Store provides it with the mechanism to target its 1bn users in ways beyond its rivals. In October 2021, within six months of introducing the privacy changes, Apple’s fledgling advertising business tripled its market share.

Apple has described its ads business as “incredibly fast-growing”, while research group Evercore ISI has estimated the iPhone maker’s ads revenue will jump from $5 billion in 2022 to $30 billion by 2026.