Online retail giant Amazon Inc. has just been slammed with what is being called the biggest privacy fine that the European Union has ever issued, as it now owes the Union’s lead privacy watchdog a sum of a whopping €746 million ($888 million) for being in violation of its rules pertaining to data protection.
The fine has been issued by the Luxembourg data protection authority, CNPD, on behalf of the EU, in a ruling on July 16 which holds the industry giant guilty for having processed personal data of its users in a way that was in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s tough set of regulations. The findings of the ruling were disclosed by Amazon Inc. through a regulatory filing on Friday, where it claimed that there was no “merit” in the same, and expressed its disapproval of the ruling. “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,” the company said.
The fine comes in the wake of a regulatory probe that was launched back in 2018 after La Quadrature du Net, a French privacy rights group, filed a complaint. This is just another one of the many antitrust probes that Amazon has been hit with in recent times, especially at the hands of the EU and the United Kingdom. The EU fines are imposed by regulatory watchdogs under the GDPR, which has granted them immense power, so much so to fine firms as much as 4% of their global annual sales. Prior to the fine at Amazon, Google had been at the receiving end of the largest fine issued by the Union, when it was slammed with a penalty of €50 million by the French regulatory authority, CNIL.
The privacy group expressed its views on the fine, with member Bastien Le Querrec saying “It’s a first step to see a fine that’s dissuasive, but we need to remain vigilant and see if the decision also includes an injunction to correct the infringing behavior.”
CNPD, on the other hand, has not issued any official statement on the matter. However, the fine was issued by it because Amazon has set up its EU headquarters at Luxembourg.
