The EU seems to live in a world all on its own. They can’t fine enough to actually change the behavior of big companies, but they can fine enough to kill their own startup culture.
I don’t feel bad for them anymore. Their voters seem to be fine with this status quo. And I get why other countries see these fines as trying to raise taxes by other means because it hasn’t and won’t change anything.
There was a lot of noise a few years back about Meta getting billion-euro fines over GDPR violations.
I looked it up: they paid almost none of the fines.
If you get a ticket from a speed camera, the government will garnish your wages if you don’t pay the fine. For trillion dollar organisations payment is apparently optional.
They just need to ban these companies from operating in their countries. They are fundamentally burdens on society run by bad people.
Your best case scenario with fines is getting them into the narrow definition of compliance just until a new "innovation" gives them a different way to conduct the same abuse while evading the letter of previous judgments.
This is a judgement from the DPC in Ireland, which has a history of reluctance [0] when it comes to enforcing the GDPR on US corporations, e.g. in [1] they even had to be ordered by a court to start investigating. I don't see the Irish DPC voluntarily choosing to take on more oversight here.
Oh no, a pop-up! Tragically in 2026 much like people lacking data protections, it's impossible to block those in any way shape or form. No such means exist.
I'm truly sorry. I think we can all agree that your mild and self-inflicted inconvenience is well worth the GDPR being scrapped. Working for something like a modicum of boundaries from rapacious data hogs, who feed into ad-tech and AI systems, is clearly worthless when balanced against some pop-ups.
Seriously are people still making that joke? Is that the best gotcha possible for a serious issue? These fines are proof that despite the law changing these companies still flaunt it... maybe that should concern you more even if your own data is trivial to you.
I don’t feel bad for them anymore. Their voters seem to be fine with this status quo. And I get why other countries see these fines as trying to raise taxes by other means because it hasn’t and won’t change anything.
I looked it up: they paid almost none of the fines.
If you get a ticket from a speed camera, the government will garnish your wages if you don’t pay the fine. For trillion dollar organisations payment is apparently optional.
Source?
So far they’ve paid something like €20 million out of €4.0 billion in GDPR fines.
Your best case scenario with fines is getting them into the narrow definition of compliance just until a new "innovation" gives them a different way to conduct the same abuse while evading the letter of previous judgments.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/ireland-fails-to...
[1] https://cooltechzone.com/news/court-irish-dpa-must-investiga...
I'm truly sorry. I think we can all agree that your mild and self-inflicted inconvenience is well worth the GDPR being scrapped. Working for something like a modicum of boundaries from rapacious data hogs, who feed into ad-tech and AI systems, is clearly worthless when balanced against some pop-ups.
Seriously are people still making that joke? Is that the best gotcha possible for a serious issue? These fines are proof that despite the law changing these companies still flaunt it... maybe that should concern you more even if your own data is trivial to you.