App Tracking Transparency is at the center of a new UK lawsuit seeking approximately $2.7 billion (£2 billion), putting one of the most recognizable iPhone privacy features under fresh legal pressure. The claim follows earlier challenges to the tracking system in France, but this action seeks compensation for developers who say Apple imposed unfair restrictions on their businesses while favoring its own advertising services.

Filed on September 3 at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, the case represents another dispute over the rules behind the familiar permission prompt. Apple rejects the allegations and maintains that it follows the same App Tracking Transparency requirements as other developers.

The amount being sought is not a fine or an awarded payment. It is the claimants’ estimate of losses, which Apple disputes.

What the App Tracking Transparency Lawsuit Alleges

The action was brought by ATT Collective Action Limited, whose director, Ann Pope, previously led antitrust enforcement at the UK Competition and Markets Authority. Law firm Hausfeld is representing the proposed class.

According to Hausfeld’s announcement of the claim, developers argue that Apple introduced the framework unfairly, without adequate consultation, and applied more burdensome requirements to outside businesses than to its own services.

The complaint focuses partly on consent. It alleges that third-party developers must obtain permission under data-protection law and then secure an additional approval through the iOS tracking prompt. Apple’s advertising services, the claimants argue, operate under a less demanding process.

Developers also contend that the introduction left them insufficient time to adapt business models dependent on advertising.

These are allegations about how the system was designed and introduced—not established findings in this UK case. The claimants’ stated position is that privacy protections should remain compatible with fair treatment of businesses.

What the Tracking Prompt Actually Protects

For someone using an iPhone, App Tracking Transparency offers a direct choice about a practice that previously could be difficult to see.

An app may want to connect information about your activity with information gathered through other companies’ apps or websites. That connection can help advertisers build a profile, target advertisements, or measure whether an advertising campaign led to a purchase.

Under Apple’s explanation of the tracking rules, apps must request permission before carrying out the tracking covered by the framework. Choosing “Ask App Not to Track” blocks access to the system advertising identifier and prohibits using other identifying information to perform that tracking instead.

The feature arrived with iOS 14.5 in 2021. It does not remove advertisements, make an app anonymous, or serve as a universal switch for every kind of data collection.

That boundary matters. A retailer remembering purchases made within its own service is not automatically doing the same thing as an advertising company linking activity across unrelated businesses.

The disagreement concerns whether those distinctions, and the consent processes built around them, give Apple an unfair commercial advantage.

Apple Says the Same Rules Apply to Everyone

Apple has responded directly to the lawsuit, defending the feature as a way to give people control over tracking across other companies’ services.

In a statement reported by AFP, a spokesperson said: “Apple is bound by the exact same requirements as all developers under ATT.”

The company also pointed to support for the feature from customers and privacy advocates.

That response challenges the foundation of the developers’ case. Apple presents App Tracking Transparency as a rule based on the type of data activity involved. The claimants argue that its practical operation places competing advertising businesses at a disadvantage.

Resolving that disagreement requires more than comparing the appearance of two permission screens. The underlying data uses, consent requirements, and commercial effects all matter.

Why Free Apps Are Part of the Dispute

Advertising can support both sides of an app business. A developer may sell advertising space inside a free app while also buying advertisements elsewhere to attract new users.

A change to tracking can therefore affect how much an app earns and how confidently its developer can measure spending on promotion.

Consider a small game studio. It needs to know whether an advertising campaign brings in players who keep using the game. If measurement becomes less precise, deciding where to spend the next marketing dollar becomes harder. Separately, advertisers may value the game’s available ad space differently when less information is available for targeting.

That explains the commercial concern without proving the legal claim. Losing revenue after a privacy change does not, by itself, establish that the change was unlawful.

There is also a consumer interest that cannot be reduced to advertising performance. Someone choosing not to be tracked is expressing a preference about personal information, not making a promise to preserve a developer’s previous income.

The difficult question is whether that preference can be protected through a system that treats competing businesses fairly.

France Has Already Examined the Consent Process

The UK action arrives after a separate French competition investigation found problems with the implementation of App Tracking Transparency.

In its March 2025 decision, France’s Autorité de la concurrence distinguished between the legitimate objective of protecting privacy and the way Apple pursued it.

The authority criticized multiple consent requests and differences in treatment between Apple and outside publishers. It also highlighted the position of smaller businesses that lack the extensive first-party data available to large platforms.

Importantly, the French authority did not argue that people should lose the ability to refuse tracking. It said adjustments to the framework could address competition concerns while retaining privacy protections.

That distinction leaves room for changes to wording, consent flows, or implementation without automatically requiring the removal of the feature. The French decision, however, does not determine liability or compensation in the separate UK proceedings.

The Claim Is for Developers, Not iPhone Owners

The official claim website describes a proposed action for UK-based app developers affected since April 2021. It estimates losses across the group rather than offering a fixed payment to everyone who owns an iPhone.

The proposed scope includes developers earning advertising revenue from third-party iOS apps and developers spending money to attract users to those apps. Whether compensation becomes available depends on the proceedings and their outcome.

For U.S. readers, the filing does not announce a change to domestic iPhone settings or create a consumer refund program. There is no reason to grant an app tracking permission simply because its developer objects to the framework.

Businesses following the case should also distinguish registering interest from receiving compensation. The claim website currently invites affected organizations to provide their details; it is not distributing a settlement.

The post App Tracking Transparency: Apple Faces $2.7 Billion UK Lawsuit appeared first on AppleMagazine.

Relocation coincides with proposed laws that opponents say would entrench power of US tech billionaires in country

Dozens of protesters converged on Peter Thiel’s mansion in Buenos Aires this week after a congressional session raised questions about the billionaire’s presence in the country.

In white masks, they held signs saying “Peter Thief” and “No to the Peter Thiel law” in front of the wrought-iron gates of the $12m (£8.9m) residence, which Thiel bought in April as he moved his family to Argentina.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Apple has filed a legal complaint with the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal seeking to overturn a secret government order requiring the company to enable access to encrypted customer data stored in its cloud services.The challenge, reported in early March 2025, targets a technical capability notice (TCN) issued by the Home Office in January under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The notice reportedly directed Apple to create the technical means for UK law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access data protected by the company’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature: an optional end-to-end encryption layer for iCloud backups, photos, notes and other files that even Apple itself cannot normally decrypt, according to Financial Times.

Apple responded by withdrawing ADP for UK users rather than comply, stating that it would not build a “back door” or master key into its products or services. The company has long argued that creating such access points would undermine security for all users and could be exploited by malicious actors. Standard iCloud encryption remains available and is accessible to Apple when presented with a valid legal warrant, but ADP provides a higher level of protection that the firm says it cannot and will not weaken.

The case is understood to be the first major legal test of the Investigatory Powers Act’s provisions allowing authorities to compel technology companies to maintain capabilities to access encrypted material. The tribunal, an independent body that reviews complaints against the UK’s security and intelligence agencies, could quash the notice if it finds the order unlawful. Proceedings were expected to begin relatively quickly, though the government was anticipated to seek restrictions on public disclosure on national security grounds.

The dispute highlights the long-running tension between tech firms’ commitment to strong encryption and governments’ desire for lawful access in cases involving terrorism, serious crime or national security. Privacy advocates have warned that any mandated vulnerability in widely used systems could have global repercussions, while UK authorities maintain that such powers are essential for public safety and are subject to legal safeguards.Apple has consistently maintained that it has never built backdoors into its systems and will not do so. The outcome of the tribunal challenge could set an important precedent for how encryption and government surveillance powers interact under UK law.

MacDailyNews Take: We’ve been fairly clear on this subject for many years:

It’s not enough that every Brit alive has a government camera shoved up their ass 24/7/365? The UK has already slipped far down the slope that they ought to rename the place Airstrip One. – MacDailyNews, November 3, 2015

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

The current batshit insane “leadership” of Airstrip One is having yet another crisis of confidence. – MacDailyNews, February 7, 2025

Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. – Potter Stewart

MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is an optional setting that offers Apple’s highest level of cloud data security. If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data — including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more — is protected using end-to-end encryption. No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple, and this data remains secure even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.

How to turn on Advanced Data Protection for iCloud

On Mac

1. Choose Apple menu  > System Settings.
2. Click your name, then click iCloud.
3. Click Advanced Data Protection, then click Turn On.
4. Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.

On iPhone and iPad

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap your name, then tap iCloud.
3. Scroll down, tap Advanced Data Protection, then tap Turn on Advanced Data Protection.
4. Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.

More info about Apple’s Advanced Data Protection for iCloud here.

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The post Apple launches legal challenge to UK demand for access to encrypted user data appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Em mais um capítulo da batalha travada entre a Apple e o governo do Reino Unido sobre a exigência de um ponto de acesso (ou backdoor) à criptografia do iCloud, a empresa apresentou uma contestação judicial contra a tentativa, por parte do governo britânico, de acessar os dados criptografados de usuários, segundo o Financial Times.

Na ação protocolada junto ao Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), no mês passado, a Apple afirmou que não criou e não pretende criar uma backdoor para os dados dos seus usuários, argumentando que a ferramenta enfraqueceria a segurança do iPhone.

A exigência iniciada com base na Technical Capability Notice (ou Notificação de Capacidade Técnica, uma ordem governamental que prevê a interceptação, por parte do governo do Reino Unido, de dados de usuários mantidos pelas grandes empresas de tecnologia) ordenava que a Apple fornecesse informações dos usuários do iCloud protegidas pela Proteção Avançada de Dados (Advanced Data Protection), obrigando a empresa a redesenhar seu serviço caso optasse por acatar as demandas estatais britânicas.

O recurso, vale lembrar, acabou sendo removido do iOS no país para evitar fornecer aquilo que foi determinado pelo governo do Reino Unido.

A abrangência dos usuários impactados também foi motivo de disputa: como a determinação inicialmente impactava integralmente a base instalada do iCloud, o governo dos Estados Unidos optou por pressionar o Reino Unido a desistir de aplicá-la a todos os usuários americanos, o que de fato ocorreu posteriormente. O recuo, porém, não durou muito, e uma segunda ação — muito semelhante à primeira — foi protocolada em outubro de 2025.

In a groundbreaking development addressing the burgeoning concern of privacy in modern medical technology, researchers at the University of Kansas have unveiled a transformative artificial intelligence (AI) model designed specifically to safeguard sensitive biometric data embedded within electrocardiograms (ECGs). This innovation is poised to reshape how medical institutions share and analyze vital cardiovascular data without compromising patient confidentiality. Electrocardiograms have long been renowned for their role in capturing the heart’s electrical activity to diagnose and monitor cardiac health; however, as AI integration deepens, these signals inadvertently reveal more than just clinical information — exposing personal attributes such as sex, age, race, and even uniquely identifiable biometric markers.

The research team at Kansas, led by doctoral candidate Fairuz Shadmani Shishir in collaboration with the KU Medical Center, has pioneered the privacy-preserving variational autoencoder (PP-VAE). This novel AI architecture is specially engineered to retain the clinical utility of ECG data while systematically obfuscating sensitive biometric features that might otherwise be inferred through advanced AI analysis. The dual objective of PP-VAE is both technically sophisticated and ethically imperative, ensuring that predictive diagnostic accuracy remains uncompromised while minimizing the risk of privacy breaches inherent in sharing raw biomedical signals.

Electrocardiograms, traditionally viewed as a straightforward diagnostic tool, have grown in complexity with modern AI techniques that can extrapolate a multiplicity of patient traits beyond the cardiovascular parameters they were designed to measure. Shishir notes that these advanced systems can uncover “soft biometrics” such as demographic information, which raises pressing data governance and patient privacy challenges. By developing PP-VAE, the researchers aim to reimagine ECG data processing whereby sensitive attributes are masked without degrading the signal quality necessary for important medical prognoses, such as identifying patients at risk of left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) abnormalities, a critical indicator linked to heart failure and mortality risk.

The technical underpinning of PP-VAE involves training independent convolutional neural networks to disentangle and suppress identifiable biometric markers while preserving clinically relevant features within the ECG signal. This balancing act required careful engineering to ensure that the encoded ECG data remained diagnostically rich, capable of supporting predictions related to conditions such as left ventricular hypertrophy and forecasting five-year mortality risk. The research showcased that their method consistently outperformed or competed with other state-of-the-art AI models, marking a significant stride in machine learning’s ability to harmonize privacy with clinical efficacy.

Importance of such privacy-preserving strategies becomes particularly clear against the backdrop of the healthcare industry’s increasing reliance on data sharing for collaborative research, AI model development, and multi-institutional patient care coordination. The KU team articulates that unrestricted data sharing without privacy controls introduces tangible risk vectors for patient re-identification and misuse. PP-VAE proposes a scalable approach toward enabling secure exchange of ECG data, thus fostering innovation and improving medical outcomes while staunchly protecting individual privacy rights.

This research also touches on the profound issue of bias within AI-driven medical diagnostics, which has historically contributed to disparities in healthcare delivery among marginalized populations. The team consciously incorporated balanced datasets reflective of gender and racial diversity in their model training to mitigate bias and improve generalized performance across varied demographic groups. While initial validations were primarily conducted using data from KU Medical Center and publicly available datasets, future work is projected to expand this cross-regional training, enhancing the robustness and impartiality of the model when applied globally.

Another compelling facet of this breakthrough is the planned public release of the PP-VAE model, reflecting the researchers’ commitment to transparency, collaboration, and democratization of AI tools in medicine. By allowing institutions worldwide to access and further refine the model with local datasets, the innovation promises to catalyze a new era of secure, privacy-conscious healthcare analytics. Adoption of PP-VAE could alleviate prevalent trust issues among patients concerned about the confidentiality of their biometric health information—a critical barrier to broader acceptance of AI-driven healthcare technologies.

Furthermore, the researchers discuss the broader implications for data-driven diagnosis, illustrating how balancing the protection of sensitive attributes with clinical utility could become a standard principle in biomedical AI applications beyond cardiology. This approach offers a blueprint for addressing ethical and privacy challenges that increasingly pervade the intersection of health data science and artificial intelligence.

The University of Kansas team’s work is also distinguished by its multidisciplinary nature, featuring collaboration between electrical engineering, computer science, and cardiovascular medicine experts. Such an integrated approach enabled the synthesis of advanced machine learning expertise with intimate clinical insight, culminating in a pragmatic solution tailored precisely to real-world healthcare needs.

This pioneering study was recently published in Scientific Reports, showcasing detailed methodology, experimental evaluations, and comparative performance analyses that underscore the efficacy and potential transformative impact of PP-VAE. Supported by the American Heart Association, this research is an exemplar of innovative technological stewardship addressing one of the most pressing challenges in digital health.

As AI continues to proliferate across medical diagnostics, models like PP-VAE will undeniably play a critical role in shaping ethical frameworks and technological architectures for future patient data management. By protecting sensitive biometric identifiers embedded in ECG data, the model not only preserves patient autonomy but also enhances the potential for AI-driven insights to be safely harnessed for better clinical outcomes worldwide.

The journey ahead involves validating and deploying this technology in diverse healthcare environments globally to ensure scalability, efficacy, and fairness remain intact as data heterogeneity increases. Yet, with the foundational work from the University of Kansas, a robust and privacy-conscious approach to ECG analysis and beyond appears well within reach, heralding a new era of secure AI-driven cardiovascular care.

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Subject of Research: Privacy-preserving AI models for electrocardiogram data analysis
Article Title: Safeguarding Patient Privacy in Electrocardiogram Analysis with AI-driven Models
Web References: Scientific Reports Article
Image Credits: Fairuz Shadmani Shishir / University of Kansas

Keywords

Privacy-preserving AI, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Variational Autoencoder, Convolutional Neural Networks, Biomedical Data Security, Cardiovascular Diagnostics, Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction, Patient Privacy, Machine Learning Bias, Medical Data Sharing, Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Clinical Decision Support