No place is safe: Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, all under scrutiny for violating GDPR
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The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR aims to provide users more control over their personal data. To put this into perspective, this law handcuffed tech companies when it comes to collecting and sharing user data.
Now European data regulators are starting to go after the big fish. There are a total of ten instances where Facebook violated the GDPR, which came into force April last year, according to the Irish Data Protection Commission(DPC).
Following the notorious Cambridge Analytica fiasco, the social media giants reported about data breaches multiple times, two of which were massive. One, where more than 50 million users’ profiles were compromised, thanks to the use of Security Tokens. And the other one was even worse — photos of nearly about seven million users went on to the third-party apps without users knowing. However, it’s not just Facebook, its acquisitions WhatsApp and Instagram are also on the blacklist.
WhatsApp is currently facing issues mainly due to two reasons – one is related to, yes you guessed it right, privacy, and the other is how it shares information with Facebook outside of the app.
Twitter, Microsoft, Apple are no safe heaven as they all violated the EU law too.
While Twitter has always been transparent about data breaches and has a record in informing such breaches within the deadline mentioned in the GDPR, the regulator authority now wants to know how much access users have over their own data on the micro-blogging site.
Microsoft and Apple are odd ones in this list. If we talk about the Redmond giant, it is the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn that now for the first time playing the villain. LinkedIn now has to go through investigations for profiling its users and targeted ads. Apple, on the other hand, is on the list due to transparency issues. Google was fined $57 million for the very same reason last month.
This is an ongoing series of investigations and the tech consortium needs to pass the litmus test or else they are very much likely to face series charges that Google faced last month.
Via: ABCNews
