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 been historically reluctant [0] to enforce 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 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.