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.
Because if you lose a company a substantial amount of money without generating profit for the shareholders then you won’t get an executive position at any other companies.
It definitely feels like that. In a lot of ways we’re already there. Stingrays have been around for more than a decade - but of course they’re technically legal.
Technology will always move faster than government, and unfortunately that means technology companies will always find ways to gather data on people with things that we don’t have laws for. The only way I can think to slow that down would be to kill the demand for tracking data, but it seems like every government and major business is into collecting, buying and selling data on human behavior right now so I don’t even have a theory as to how to actually reduce the demand for it. It’s way out of hand.
The best option for individuals right now is to live in a place that has some decent legal restrictions, like the EU or California, and of course vote for politicians who favor privacy regulations.
As I’m reading this, stingrays are pretty ineffective if users are using E2EE messaging (or just a VPN), and can then pretty much only be used for location estimation.