LinkedIn Fined $335 Million Over Targeted Advertising in Europe

Irish authorities have fined LinkedIn €310 million for privacy violations related to its ad targeting business, a blow to the Microsoft-owned job networking platform in the European market. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced the penalties, totaling around $335 million, on Thursday following an investigation into how LinkedIn handles users’ personal information to generate personalized ads. The probe concluded that the website lacked an “appropriate legal basis” for doing so. According to the DPC, LinkedIn sought user consent to share their personal data with third parties for targeted ads. However, the regulator found that the consent was not “freely given, sufficiently informed, specific, or unambiguous,” falling short of the standards set by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....