Huge privacy fines are good, now we need more of them

 July 14, 2019

In the last few days, multiple fines related to privacy have been announced. More specifically:

• British Airways €203M/£183M/$230M (CNN, The Verge)
• Marriott €109M/£99M/$124M (CNN, The Guardian)
• Facebook ca€4.5B/ca£4B/ca$5B (The Telegraph, NYT)

Even if I talk about them “collectively”, I would like to point out that the third one is very different in nature, in nature and in the jurisdiction, and therefore in the amount of the fine from the first two, which are fairly similar among them.

GDPR - 1 year later

 May 25, 2019

One year has passed by the 25/05/2018, the day that the GDPR started to be enforced. Today I’d like to see how this first year of GDPR went and what we could be expecting for the future given what we have seen so far.

The first consideration that I think is obvious but interesting is that the Internet did not close down on the 25/05/2018 as many were worried. In fact, not much changed on that day. A thing that did change a lot is the number of banners asking the authorization to give some cookies to your browser. This increase of cookie banners is an interesting phenomenon since the differences between the EU cookie law and the GDPR on cookies are minor. I think this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that now companies are more worried about violating those regulations than before, thanks to the massive fines that they can incur into with the GDPR.