- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
Board of Directors. Entire C-suite on trial. People with 10% or more ownership of shares. That would change things.
Oh, emails were deleted and couldn’t be recovered? CTO is at fault. Skip start, go straight to jail.
Well… look, I’m all for punishing white collar crime, we should do more of that, but I’d much rather incentivize preventing this kind of thing in the first place than punishing people after the fact.
Taking away the revenue (remember revenue means all the income, not just the profit) from criminal behavior does that, because it means the business risks financial collapse.
For instance, in this case if LinkedIn’s EU ad sales department violated EU law, then all revenue from the EU ad sales department should be forfeit, for the entire time period during which the violation occurred.
This would be a lot more effective than threatening rich people with jail time, because rich people can always make a deal to serve their time in a nice facility or house arrest or something. Instead, we threaten to wipe out the business financially.