The European Union rolled out its mammoth data privacy regulation five years ago this week, and has since handed down billions in fines.
Ireland’s data watchdog smashed the record for an individual fine on Monday when it demanded 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from Meta over its transfers of personal data between Europe and the United States.
Here are some of the worst offenders of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media firm – owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has racked up roughly two billion euros in fines.
Breaches by Meta have included a mega-leak of some 533 million phone numbers and emails, mishandling children’s data and repeatedly failing to give a legal basis for its data collection.
Meta, along with the likes of Google, Twitter and LinkedIn has its European headquarters in Ireland, a low-tax regime that has courted big tech.
The Irish privacy watchdog has been reluctant to hand down big fines but said in a statement on Monday that the EU’s central authorities had ordered it to collect 1.2 billion euros from Meta.
Austrian campaign group NOYB said it had spent millions in a decade-long legal battle to force the Irish watchdog to tackle the case.
“It is kind of absurd that the record fine will go to Ireland – the EU Member State that did everything to ensure that this fine is not issued,” said NOYB’s Max Schrems.
Luxembourg lit a torch under the Silicon Valley data industry in 2021 by slapping Amazon with a record fine of 746 million euros.
The country, whose low-tax policies have led campaigners to label it a tax haven, refused to give details of its decision at the time, only providing a brief statement after Amazon revealed the fine in its regulatory filings.
The online retail giant had been sued by a European consumer group claiming personal data was collected for ad-targeting without permission.
However, Amazon denied any breach and promised to appeal. It is unclear whether the fine has been paid.Google has faced plenty of GDPR pain too.
France’s data watchdog hit the search giant with 50 million euros in fines for a lack of transparency on its Android mobile operating system in 2019 – the biggest such fine of that year.
Clearview AI may not be a household name, but it claims to own billions of photos of people’s faces that it sells as a searchable AI-powered database to law enforcement and other clients.
It scrapes the images from the web, often from social media accounts, without asking permission.
Privacy watchdogs in Greece, Italy, France and the UK have all hit the US firm with fines totally roughly 70 million euros, and regulators in Germany and Austria have declared it illegal.The firm has consistently said it has no offices or clients in Europe and is not subject to EU privacy laws.
The status of the fines is unclear. France issued a penalty of five million euros recently, accusing the firm of failing to pay the initial fine.
In the early days of the GDPR, several watchdogs cracked down on public institutions, raising profound questions about the regulation’s scope.
Bulgaria fined its own tax authority around three million euros in 2019 after hackers stole the details of millions of people.
But several issues in the case were referred to the European Court of Justice, including whether such a hack automatically meant the data controller had not complied with GDPR.
The court has not yet issued a final decision.
Portugal handed down one of the first significant fines under GDPR – 400,000 euros – in November 2018 to a hospital near Lisbon.
The watchdog ruled that the institution had allowed unauthorised access to patients’ data and the case was seen as an early wake-up call for public bodies to get busy with GDPR compliance.
Portugal later gave public institutions three years to adapt to the new regime, meaning the fine was never enforced.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which acts on behalf of the European Union, said on Monday that the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) ordered it to collect “an administrative fine”.
In response, Meta said it was “disappointed to have been singled out”, and the ruling was “flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies”.
“The ability for data to be transferred across borders is fundamental to how the global open internet works,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead said in a blog post. “… Thousands of businesses and other organisations rely on the ability to transfer data between the EU and the US in order to operate and provide services that people use every day.”
“We intend to appeal both the decision’s substance and its orders, including the fine, and will seek a stay through the courts to pause the implementation deadlines,” they said.
This is the largest fine imposed under the General Data Protection Regulation. In 2021, Amazon was fined 746m euros ($807m) in Luxembourg for breaching the bloc’s data protection laws.
Initially, Ireland’s DPC had wanted to force Meta to suspend the offending data transfers, saying a fine “would exceed the extent of powers that could be described as being ‘appropriate, proportionate and necessary'”.
But its peer regulators in the EU, known as Concerned Supervisory Authorities (CSAs), disagreed.
“All four CSAs took the view that Meta Ireland should be subject to an administrative fine,” the DPC said.
With no hope of consensus, the DPC referred its objections to the EDPB, which ordered that Meta Ireland suspend future transfers of personal data to the US and pay a fine.
In Meta’s blog post, the company said the EDPB decision to overrule the DPC “raises serious questions”.
“No country has done more than the US to align with European rules via their latest reforms, while transfers continue largely unchallenged to countries such as China,” Clegg and Newstead contended.
EU regulators have already hit Meta with fines of hundreds of millions of euros over data breaches by its Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook services.
It is the third fine imposed on Meta so far this year in the EU and the fourth in six months.
