A Luxembourg court has ordered Amazon to pay a €746 million fine imposed for data protection breaches by the national data watchdog, throwing out an appeal brought by the online retail giant.

The administrative court dismissed the appeal against the penalty in a hearing on Tuesday, still the second-largest ever imposed since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in 2018.

The complaints against Amazon originated in France, where 10,000 online users organised by a digital rights advocacy group complained that even though the company declares the data they collect and how they process it, they do not explicitly ask for consent for processing. The case was taken up by Luxembourg’s CNPD because it is the site of Amazon’s European headquarters.

The fine had been imposed on Amazon in July 2021, and the company had appealed the decision in October of the same year, with the CNPD suspending the fine as a result of the appeal. The appeal case had been launched in court over a year ago, at the start of 2024.

In its ruling on Tuesday the administrative court sided with the CNPD, ruling that Amazon had demonstrated “non-compliance” with several aspects of GDPR, including “transparency and information obligations towards individuals affected by the processing of their personal data” and “violation of the right to object to the processing of personal data.”

Amazon is “considering an appeal” against the court’s ruling, a spokesperson said in a statement to the Luxembourg Times on Wednesday.

“We work hard to earn customer trust, and customer privacy is a top priority. We have always been clear with customers and given them control over whether they see personalised advertising based on their interests,” the Amazon spokesperson said.

“We appealed the CNPD’s decision because we strongly disagree with their ruling. Despite our best efforts to engage constructively on the proper interpretation of new and untested provisions of European privacy law, the CNPD’s decision instead imposed an unprecedented fine based on subjective interpretations of the law about which they had not previously published any interpretive guidance,” the spokesperson added.

(This article was originally published by the Luxemburger Wort and was updated at 16:45 on 19 March 2025 with a statement from Amazon. Translation, adaptation and additonal reporting by Kabir Agarwal)