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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
GDPR Fines Haven't Rocked the Data Privacy World
When it launched, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became bigger than Beyoncé. Since then, some of the hype around the law has waned, but there's still one thing that gets people excited: fines.
Under the law, data-protection regulators across Europe have boosted powers to punish companies and organizations who are found in breach of the GDPR. The most serious consequences can be fines of up to €20 million ($22.4 million) or 4 percent of a firm's global turnover, whichever is greater. These are larger than the £500,000 ($650,000) penalties that could be issued by the UK's regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, under the old data-protection rules.
Before the GDPR was enforced there were outlandish predictions that businesses would be hit with huge fines for data-protection issues. Some estimates claimed GDPR fines would be 79 times higher than those under previous rules; others said banks would be hit with fines of up to €4.7 billion ($5.3 billion) in the coming years.
Unsurprisingly there hasn't been a deluge of fines running into millions or billions of euros, but the EU's 28 data-protection regulators are slowly beginning to flex their enforcement muscles—including against big tech companies.
After the first year of the GDPR, the European Data Protection Board reported (PDF) that nations had examined 206,326 cases under the law. Helen Dixon, the Irish data-protection regulator who has jurisdiction over US tech companies because of their European headquarters in Ireland, has investigations open into at least 17 multinational firms. These include Facebook and its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram, plus Google and Twitter.
Regulators have already moved against big tech companies and others who have failed to properly protect consumer data. Here's what we know about the GDPR fines that have been issued around Europe so far and why they've been handed out.
[Ed's Note: Under the fair use laws we cannot publish much of the story but the report details a handful of cases where fines have been levied and explains why such action was deemed appropriate in each case. Most companies so far penalised by fines are European, although ongoing investigations exist against business from the US and elsewhere.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday November 04 2019, @08:42AM
Well, there's your answer. There have actually been plenty of successful smaller prosecutions [itgovernance.co.uk] under the GDPR that haven't really attracted much media coverage because a few €100k is "meh!" compared to whatever some random celeb screwed up over this week. There have also been some fairly major ones that *did* get a lot of media attention; France's CNIL fined Google €50M [www.cnil.fr], while the UK's ICO intends to fine British Airways £183M [ico.org.uk] and Marriott International $99M [ico.org.uk] (both those are still subject to appeal and reduction).
However, if you're going to go after something like a major search/social media company for the full 4% of global annual turnover for some truly egregious breach of the regulations, then - after you've actually identified such an breach - you are going to want to make sure that you have them bang to rights and with limited hope of getting much of a reduction on appeal, or of taking sufficient steps to fix the problem so that you are obliged to reduce the fine considerably. Especially since it costs a lot of money to take on major multinationals because they tend to be capable of readily deploying teams of very good lawyers and funding them for protracted legal fights. That's going to take a good deal of time gather the necessary evidence, put a case together, then run it through the courts while hopefully avoiding an embarassingly expensive defeat for the prosecution. I'm pretty sure the multi-billion Euro fines under the GDPR are coming, but we're just going to need to be patient a little longer while the cases are built.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!