LinkedIn Faces EU Complaint Over User Data Access
A prominent European data privacy group has filed a formal complaint against LinkedIn with Austrian regulators, accusing the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform of selling user data while simultaneously blocking users from accessing their own information without charge.
Vienna-based Noyb — an abbreviation for “None of Your Business” — lodged the complaint with the Austrian Data Protection Authority on Tuesday on behalf of a LinkedIn user seeking full access to his personal data held by the platform.
The group is demanding both a complete response to the user’s access request and the imposition of a financial penalty against LinkedIn.
At the heart of the complaint is what Noyb describes as a contradiction: LinkedIn reportedly invokes data protection concerns as grounds for refusing to comply with user access requests, yet simultaneously directs users toward its paid premium membership subscription as the route to seeing who has viewed their profile pages.
“People have the right to receive their own data free of charge,” Noyb data protection lawyer Martin Baumann said in a statement.
The group further raised questions over the legality of LinkedIn’s profile-visit tracking feature, saying it was “unclear” whether such tracking is legally permissible, given that the company reportedly does not seek active consent from users before monitoring who visits their pages.
Noyb, which describes itself as a non-profit organisation aiming to close the gap between privacy laws and the reality of corporate practice, has filed more than 800 cases against numerous companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, and is supported by more than 5,000 members.
The group began operating in 2018 following the introduction of the European Union’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation, which was designed to give individuals greater control over how companies use their personal information. Since then, Noyb’s complaints have repeatedly prompted enforcement action by data protection authorities across Europe against major technology companies.
The latest action adds LinkedIn to a growing list of tech giants facing scrutiny under the GDPR. The regulation grants users explicit rights to access their personal data held by companies, generally at no cost, with firms required to respond within a stipulated timeframe.
LinkedIn has not publicly responded to the complaint at the time of this report.