Amazon was fined $887 million by the Luxembourg data protection regulator for violating EU GDPR
The Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection issued a huge fine to Amazon recently for violating the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
For this reason, the data regulator issued a fine to Amazon, Calculating 4% of Amazon’s total global revenue, it fined Amazon $887 million.
According to the General Data Protection Regulations, regulators have the right to impose fines of up to 4% of global revenues on companies that violate the regulations or calculate specific fines according to regulations.
And this wave of Amazon was directly subject to the highest ceiling fines and therefore set a record of fines. This is also the highest amount of fines officially implemented by the General Data Protection Regulation.
The source of this ruling came from a complaint initiated by a French privacy organization in 2018, which accused Amazon of processing data without user consent.
According to the General Data Protection Regulations, all companies must obtain the user’s prior consent when processing EU citizen data, otherwise, the data will neither be collected nor processed.
Violations are mainly due to Amazon’s processing of user personal information without the user’s consent, which is not directly related to its cloud computing services and other network services.
Since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation, many large multinational technology companies have been investigated, but only Amazon has been fined.
All of this was decided by Luxembourg because Amazon’s EU headquarters is located in Luxembourg, and the Luxembourg data protection supervisory authority is also one of the main EU supervisory authorities.
The French privacy protection organization that initiated the complaint stated that this was only the first step to victory. The organization will continue to observe whether the regulator issues an injunction to correct the infringement.
The organization has not yet received a decision issued by the Luxembourg regulatory agency, so the organization does not know the specific content of the ruling in this case, so it cannot be announced.
An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC:
“Maintaining the security of our customers’ information and their trust are top priorities. There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party. These facts are undisputed. We strongly disagree with the CNPD’s ruling, and we intend to appeal. The decision relating to how we show customers relevant advertising relies on subjective and untested interpretations of European privacy law, and the proposed fine is entirely out of proportion with even that interpretation.”
