Cybernews reports that Paris-based software firm Kaspr — which provides a paid Chrome browser extension allowing the gathering of LinkedIn users' professional contact information — has been ordered by France's National Commission on Informatics and Liberty to pay $249,600 for data scraping violations under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
Aside from collecting data from LinkedIn users that limited contact sharing with up to second-degree connections, the Cognism-owned company also held on obtained information over an excessively prolonged period, according to CNIL. Transparency on data collection practices has also been severely lacking on the part of Kaspr, which only vaguely notified individuals whose information had been collected four years after it had unveiled the extension in 2018. "When people who had been canvassed asked Kaspr how their contact details had been collected, the company simply told them that their contact details had been collected from publicly accessible sources," said regulators.
