Excerpt from SiliconANGLE Article, Published on Oct 24, 2024.

LinkedIn, the professional networking platform owned by Microsoft Corp., has been hit with a significant €310 million ($334 million) fine by the European Union’s privacy watchdog. The fine, one of the largest imposed on an American tech company under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), follows an investigation by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) into LinkedIn’s data processing and advertising practices.

The DPC found LinkedIn guilty of failing to secure proper user consent for the collection and use of their data in targeted advertising. This decision underscores the ongoing tension between big tech firms and European regulators over privacy protections. The DPC stated, “The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law, and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subject’s fundamental right to data protection.”

The origins of the investigation date back to a 2018 complaint from the French nonprofit organization La Quadrature Du Net. Following the initial complaint, France’s data authority provided relevant evidence to the DPC, Ireland’s regulatory body responsible for enforcing GDPR on U.S. tech giants operating in the EU.

In response, LinkedIn maintained that it believed its practices aligned with GDPR requirements. “While we believe we have been in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, we are working to ensure our ad practices meet this decision by the IDPC’s deadline,” a spokesperson said.

The €310 million fine ranks as the fifth-largest GDPR penalty issued by the DPC and the sixth-largest across the EU. Meta Platforms Inc. holds the record for the largest fine to date with a €1.2 billion penalty in 2023, underscoring the EU’s firm stance on enforcing data privacy protections on global technology companies.

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