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Amazon faces biggest privacy fine ever in European Union, after regulator fined € 746m ($ 888m) for breaking strict rules block data protection.
The Luxembourg data protection authority CNPD imposed a record fine on Amazon in a July 16 decision accusing the world’s first e-commerce site of processing personal data, in violation of the general data protection regulation of the European Union or the General Data Protection Regulation. Amazon disclosed the results in a regulatory filing Friday, saying the decision was “unfounded.”
“There has been no data breach and customer data has not been disclosed to any third parties,” Amazon said in a statement opposing the decision, adding that it plans to appeal.
The decision ends with an investigation that began with a 2018 complaint by French privacy group La Quadrature du Net.
“This is a first step towards seeing a dissuasive fine, but we must be vigilant and see if the decision also includes an injunction to correct the offending behavior,” said Bastien Le Querec, member of the litigation team of La Quadrature du Net.
The powers of EU data protection regulators have increased considerably since the rules of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force in May 2018. For the first time, they allow regulators to ” Impose fines of up to 4% of a company’s annual worldwide sales. The biggest fine to date of 50 million euros imposed on Google was pronounced by the French CNIL.
Amazon has its European base in Luxembourg, which makes the local regulator responsible for monitoring compliance with data protection law.
Amazon has come under scrutiny in recent years for the large amount of data it has collected from a range of customers and partners, including independent merchants selling in the retail market, users from Alexa and buyers on its website.
The company says it collects data to improve the customer experience and sets guidelines for what employees can do with it. But some lawmakers and regulators have expressed concerns that the company has used what it knows to give itself an unfair advantage in the market.
The privacy investigation also adds to the intense antitrust scrutiny of Amazon’s activities in Europe. The company is the subject of a European Union investigation into its use of seller data on its platform and whether it unfairly promotes its own products. Germany has several lawsuits over Amazon sales and the UK is also considering cases similar to the European Union.
The European Commission also said last month that it saw potential antitrust issues with voice assistants and the data Amazon and others are allowed to collect on user behavior.
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