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LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches (techcrunch.com)

submitted 6 days ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The administrative penalties, which are worth around $335 million at current exchange rates, have been issued by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulator found a raft of breaches, including beaches to the lawfulness, fairness and transparency of its data processing in this area.

The GDPR requires that uses of people’s information have a proper legal basis. In this case, the justifications LinkedIn had relied upon to run its tracking ads business were found to be invalid. It also did not properly inform users about its uses of their information, per the DPC’s decision.

LinkedIn had sought to claim (variously) “consent”-, “legitimate interests”- and “contractual necessity”-based legal bases for processing people’s information — when obtained directly and/or from third parties — to track and profile its users for behavioral advertising. However, the DPC found none were valid. LinkedIn also failed to comply with the GDPR principles of transparency and fairness.

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[–] slowcakes@programming.dev 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sure but when they actively decide to break the law and the rights of millions people, they are criminals or part of a criminal Enterprise and you should be on trail. The people in position of power, choose to break the law because of profit motivation, of course they shouldn't keep the money because it was made illegally.

Why would they care about the consequences of fines, when they themselves don't have to pay it, they can just cash out and not lose a cent, its the company that gets fined.

Fuck em, they should face several years of prison and lose the right to run a business or having a position of power, for gross violations of human rights and shouldn't be trusted to hold power.

What stops Nvidia, intel or whatever to build the same kind of privacy violating technology directly in the hardware. I don't even know how our phones are even allowed to collect all the data that they do, what are you going to do in the future when every piece of electronics you buy, is collecting data. You wouldn't even need internet, they'll just send it to the nearest 5g tower.

In 5 - 10 years, we'll live in the era of mass surveillance (for your safety of course). AI combined with all the data available, will make the world a living hell for regular people. 1984 will no longer be science fiction, because we elect self serving clowns, total morons that aren't capable of doing anything because they are starstruck by rich people and tech bros.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why would they care about the consequences of fines, when they themselves don’t have to pay it, they can just cash out and not lose a cent, its the company that gets fined.

Because if you lose a company a substantial amount of money without generating profit for the shareholders then you won't get an executive position at any other companies.

In 5 - 10 years, we’ll live in the era of mass surveillance

It definitely feels like that. In a lot of ways we're already there. Stingrays have been around for more than a decade - but of course they're technically legal.

Technology will always move faster than government, and unfortunately that means technology companies will always find ways to gather data on people with things that we don't have laws for. The only way I can think to slow that down would be to kill the demand for tracking data, but it seems like every government and major business is into collecting, buying and selling data on human behavior right now so I don't even have a theory as to how to actually reduce the demand for it. It's way out of hand.

The best option for individuals right now is to live in a place that has some decent legal restrictions, like the EU or California, and of course vote for politicians who favor privacy regulations.

[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago

As I'm reading this, stingrays are pretty ineffective if users are using E2EE messaging (or just a VPN), and can then pretty much only be used for location estimation.