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Apple may be breaking EU privacy rules over personalized ads for users, France's CNIL says

By Matthew Newman and Nicholas Hirst
  • 24 Mar 2021 12:57
  • 24 Mar 2021 12:57
Apple’s system for advertising its apps and services — in which users receive targeted ads as a default setting on their devices — may be a “serious” violation of EU privacy rules, according to a confidential opinion by France’s data protection authority.
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Matthew Newman

Chief Correspondent


Matthew Newman is a chief correspondent for MLex and writes about data protection, privacy, telecoms, cyber security and artificial intelligence. Matthew began his journalism career in 1991 in community newspapers. He worked as a reporter in Riga, Latvia in 1993 and then moved to Chicago where he covered local news. In 1995, he became a personal finance reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, and was then transferred to Brussels in 1999. He specialized in EU regulatory affairs, including trade and telecom issues. He began covering competition for Bloomberg News as an EU court reporter in 2004. In 2010, he was named spokesman for Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner. In January 2012, he helped launch the commission’s proposal to overall data protection rules.

Nicholas Hirst

Chief Correspondent


Nicholas covers EU merger review and antitrust investigations for Mlex in Brussels. He previously wrote about EU affairs for Politico Europe, European Voice and PaRR. After earning an LLM in European law from the College of Europe in Bruges, he spent a year working in the competition practice of a leading competition law firm in Brussels 2009-10. He graduated in modern European languages from Oxford University in 2006.

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