Luxembourg judge hits pause on Amazon's daily payments of disputed $844m GDPR fine
- Reference: 1640007187
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/12/20/luxembourg_amazon_fine/
- Source link:
The penalty stems from [1]a July ruling against Amazon Europe Core S.à r.l. in which the Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) claimed that Amazon's processing of personal data did not comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This is according to a financial filing accompanying Amazon's Q2 2021 [2]earnings report [PDF].
[3]
Amazon said it would challenge the ruling, which it deemed to have no merit.
[4]
[5]
In a statement to The Register at the time, the global e-commerce behemoth said: "Maintaining the security of our customers' information and their trust are top priorities. There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party. These facts are undisputed. We strongly disagree with the CNPD’s ruling, and we intend to appeal.
[6]India takes Amazon’s biggest local e-tail alliance out of its shopping cart
[7]Midwest tornado destroys Amazon warehouse, killing six after worker 'told not to leave'
[8]Amazon fined €1.13bn by Italy's antitrust authorities for abusing its power
[9]Amazon accused of grossly underreporting COVID-19 cases to US labor agency
"The decision relating to how we show customers relevant advertising relies on subjective and untested interpretations of European privacy law, and the proposed fine is entirely out of proportion with even that interpretation."
The €746m fine was the largest penalty under GDPR to date, topping the previous record of €50m from the French National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) against Google in 2019 by almost 15 times. In fact, Amazon's fine is more than twice the sum of all previous GDPR penalties combined (€303m).
The judge ruled that the orders by the Luxembourg data protection authority were not "sufficiently clear, precise and without uncertainty" to allow Amazon to meet the ultimatum, [10]according to Bloomberg .
[11]
At a hearing earlier this month, Amazon lawyer Thomas Berger said the watchdog's deadline was "unrealistic" because it's not clear what changes are required. "We have no guidance about what we need to do, so how do we do it?" ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/30/amazon_european_privacy_fine/
[2] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001018724/cbae1abf-eddb-4451-9186-6753b02cc4eb.pdf
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YcC2vjS4N8ugzs6@kv6cMwAAAJI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YcC2vjS4N8ugzs6@kv6cMwAAAJI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YcC2vjS4N8ugzs6@kv6cMwAAAJI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/20/amazon_future_coupons_approval_revoked/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/13/deadly_midwest_storms_destroy_amazon_warehouse/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/amazon_fined_italy/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/01/amazon_covid_reporting/
[10] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/amazon-fends-off-extra-privacy-fines-after-record-penalty-in-eu
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YcC2vjS4N8ugzs6@kv6cMwAAAJI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Redeployment
To be fair to Amazon court ruling normally gives details of the infractions and then explicit requirements as a result of those infractions.
However in this case this seems to have been more along the lines of 'you've been naughty so sort it' with no more meat on the bones.
No doubt there will be an out of court settlement at some point that keeps everyone happy, especially the lawyers
Re: Redeployment
Also, they might try interpreting the law conservatively (i.e. to make sure there is no change of violating it) as opposed to aggressively (i.e. to circumvent it for maximum advantage to themselves).
Re: Redeployment
But we commit so many felonies every day; how can we possibly know which ones you've nicked us for if you don't spell it out? After all, we wouldn't want to stop committing the others by mistake!
Typical Govenmental Behaviour
Council Planing Inspector visits your building and says you don't comply with regs, but won't tell you what you need to do to become complyant.
EU Invents a number and expects countries / companys to pay without any acurate explination of how they got to that figure
Re: Typical Govenmental Behaviour
We had it with a VAT inspector. He surcharged us the VAT on a transaction with no explanation of how we'd infringed, when challenged he just told us to read the rules (we had, we complied).
His boss did the next audit and immediately refunded the surcharge, with interest, as he couldn't understand it either.
Re: Typical Govenmental Behaviour
So the law was clear and didnt need explaining then. Like the one on GDPR that 99.999% of Web companies manage to comply with.
Re: Typical Govenmental Behaviour
If you think 99.999% are complying with GDPR you are living in a different reality than me.
Re: Typical Govenmental Behaviour
99.998% are not complying either, they just haven’t been caught yet.
I may be wrong, but I think Amazon deliberately obstruct CCPA requests
I tried, I think starting about two and a half years ago now, to get the information Amazon keep about me, from Amazon, via a CCPA request.
I have yet to succeed.
I may be wrong, but I am of the view Amazon deliberately obstruct such requests - the nearest I managed to get to the data was a web-page with *over sixty individual download links*, with Amazon telling me they expected me to manually download each file (and, later, that "We will do not more than we have done; we look forward to seeing you back on Amazon.com").
Amazon customer support has usually been appalling - disconnected, arrogant, conceited, unresponsive, and almost always unable to read any ticket history - although occasionally with a single person who would be helpful, but it's not been enough to actually get hold of the data.
Re: I may be wrong, but I think Amazon deliberately obstruct CCPA requests
"the nearest I managed to get to the data was a web-page with *over sixty individual download links*, with Amazon telling me they expected me to manually download each file"
Sorry, but I can't see what's wrong with such a response? And if you haven't downloaded the files and looked at them, how can you know you haven't succeeded?
Re: I may be wrong, but I think Amazon deliberately obstruct CCPA requests
> Sorry, but I can't see what's wrong with such a response?
You must work for Amazon ;-)
You try manually downloading *over sixty files*, one by one, by hand, in your browser, and see how far you get.
Amazon could just have well have provided a single archive file with all those files in.
The ruling had nothing to do with data security or leaks...
But targeted ads without prior consent of processing and using personal data for such use.
Amazon as usual is trying to cry "look at the finger" to avoid to see the gorilla behind it.
Re: The ruling had nothing to do with data security or leaks...
Given some of the "targeting" it looks as if they have a good excuse.
Redeployment
> "We have no guidance about what we need to do, so how do we do it?"
Perhaps if they took some of their lawyers off making up specious excuses and put them to work on reading the EU law, they could work out what needed to be done. As every other company that manages to operate without breaking that particular law, does.
They would probably get to the solution even quicker if the daily penalty was increased,