Amazon’s stratospheric fine, nearly 750 million euros, in Europe

Although no official communication has been released yet, Luxembourg’s data protection authority has decided to impose a fine Amazon regarding Violation of the European General Data Protection Regulation which regulates the processing of personal data.

Fine Stratosphere for Amazon

The decision, as Bloomberg first reported on the news, will be made on July 16 at the end of a long investigation that began in 2018. It all started with the French Association for Digital Privacy Rights. La Quadrature du Net, which reported a violation of the regulation that took effect in May 2018.

The association disputed that Amazon could collect and use users’ personal data to display ads relevant to their interests, and to act as a monitor of behavioral analysis and ad targeting. In this way, the ads were shown to the most receptive users for the benefit of their sales.

Such analyzes, he claims Quadrature du net, could not be based on the need to create a contract with users and this led to the opening of the investigation, which ended a few days ago with Amazon slapped a record €746 million fine.

Amazon is not suitable

For its part, the e-commerce giant is not there, even if it is waiting for the official press release to understand what violations of the GDPR led to the economic sanctions. According to the company founded by Jeff Bezos, the Luxembourg authority’s decision is completely unfounded and no data breach was made, with no data exposed to third parties.

The penalty imposed on Amazon, if confirmed, would be the largest for violating the European General Data Protection Regulation, which is far more significant than the 50 million euros imposed on Google in 2019 and relates, even in this case, to the collection of users’ personal data.