Ireland’s Privacy Regulator Fined LinkedIn $335m

Ireland’s privacy regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), has fined LinkedIn $335 million (€310 million). This is one of the largest fines ever imposed on a company for violating the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), writes reporter Suzanne Smalley in The Record.

Citing a statement from the DPC, Smalley says that the allegation, in this case, was that LinkedIn had been using customer data to perform behavioral analyses that were subsequently used to target advertising without transparency and based on the consent that “was not freely given, sufficiently informed or specific, or unambiguous. “

In a statement posted on its website, LinkedIn maintains it didn’t violate the GDPR but would work “to ensure our ad practices meet this decision by the IDPC’s deadline.”

The DPC investigation of LinkedIn came after claims about the matter were made to a French regulatory body in 2018. Smalley writes that the Irish regulator took over the probe because it is charged with overseeing Microsoft, and LinkedIn is a Microsoft company.

The writer concludes with an implicit warning for tech companies. European regulators have been aggressively enforcing GDPR rules about how tech companies can use individual user data, she says, and she cites two examples:

Last year, the DPC fined Meta $1.3 billion for moving Facebook users’ personal data out of the EU; in 2021, the privacy regulator in Luxembourg fined Amazon $815 million for an infraction similar to the one charged against LinkedIn: failing to get consent before using customer data to target advertising.