Amazon, the American retail giant, has been slapped with a penalty of 746 million Euros($849 USD) for using its consumer data for ad targeting without permission of the populace of Luxembourg—a small European country surrounded by Belgium, France and Germany.
Highly placed sources say that the Luxembourg’s National Commission for Data Protection(CNPD) pronounced the fine on July 16th,2021 on the Retailing giant for not complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR).
The Jeff Bezos led company confirmed the news through its SEC filing and stated that it intends to challenge the penalty and will respond legally.
To those who want to hear more on this news, it has to be notified over here that the penalty was not related to any data breach and that no customer data was exposed in the incident.
E-commerce giant Amazon says that it cooperated throughout the investigation, but is against the findings & analysis and so plans to appeal on a legal note.
Already such kind of anti-trust litigation’s are being faced by Amazon from the past three years and one such complaint is that it accesses info from its marketplace platform and gains knowledge of popular products that are being sold by 3rd party vendors/suppliers and offers the same products through its label at a very low price. And if and when found guilty, the cloud computing company might face a penalty that could be as much as 10% of the company’s annual revenue.
NOTE- Penalty was issued as per the complaint lodged in 2018 by the La Quadrature Du Net, a privacy rights group from France.
