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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 12 2018, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the ready-aim-sue dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Lawsuits Aim Billions in Fines at Equifax and Ad-Targeting Companies

Equifax, Experian and Oracle are among a slate of companies whose business is consumer information, that could soon face billions of dollars in fines for improper data handling.

Privacy International has filed complaints against seven corporations, consisting of data brokers (Acxiom and Oracle), companies that provide consumer profiling and targeting data for advertising purposes (Criteo, Tapad and Quantcast), and two credit-referencing agencies that collect sensitive financial data on roughly everyone in the U.S. as well as many in Europe and elsewhere (Equifax and Experian). The complaints have been lodged with data protection authorities in France, Ireland and the U.K. The group is asking for an investigation into their data-handling practices under the auspices of Europe's strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR, which went into effect in May, gives regulators real teeth when it comes to enforcing privacy mandates, including issuing fines of up to 4 percent of an offending company's annual turnover. That would equal billions of dollars for Fortune 500 companies such as Equifax, which consumers know from the massive data breach last year.

Aside from the credit-reporting giants, the complaints target companies that, despite collecting and using or selling the data of millions of people, are not household names.

“These complaints put under the microscope companies normally invisible to consumers,” Alan Toner, researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Threatpost. “Internet users know little about these data brokers and advertising technology actors who are tracking their browsing activity on the web and merging this information with data collected from other online and offline sources. This occurs using unique identifiers such as cookies, device IDs and other unique identifiers. These are encompassed by the definition of personal data in the EU, which is broader than the idea of personally identifiable information used in the U.S. (names, email addresses, Social Security numbers etc.).”

“Our complaints argue that the way these companies exploit people’s data, in particular for profiling, is in contravention of the GDPR,” PI said in an announcement.

PI argues that none of the companies complies with the GDPR’s specific, named protection principles of transparency, fairness, lawfulness, purpose limitation, data minimization and accuracy.

“They amass vast amounts of data about millions of individuals, repurpose these data to infer (profile) more data (accurate and inaccurate) about individuals, then share this data with a multitude of third parties for innumerable purposes,” PI explained. “Many have also had data breaches in the past.”


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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @05:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @05:35PM (#760977)

    maybe someday someone will just shoot someone that is causing this. shooting up a bunch of teenagers or people at a bar doesn't really solve any problems.

    not that i condone violence. but if there will be no gun control, at least they can be more thoughtful about their aim. then we dont have to send thoughts and prayers, because we will have had some answered when ceos and the like are called home and the board members remaining get to consider if they are next. if we are especially feeling giving in their times of need, we can send a sucks to be you instead of hopes.

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