Recently, Greek and European users often see applications, social networks and messaging services to inform them of new terms of use and ask for their consent. Why is this happening; Because the new European data protection regulation (General Data Protection Regulation) is now in force, which obliges technology giants around the world to change their policy and give the “Old Continent’s” users more control over their personal data.
Already, big American tech giants – such as Facebook, Google and WhatsApp – have rushed in order to harmonize with the new regulations, which take effect on May 25.
This Law has been “built” on older rules of the European Union for the protection of citizens’ privacy, such as the “Shield of Privacy EU. – USA “(Privacy Shield) and the Directive 95/46 of the European Parliament on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data. However, it extends these measures in two main ways. Firstly, the new regulations raise the bar for the collection of personal data of European citizens higher than ever.
This is because companies should by default have explicit and up-to-date consent from users every time they collect data. Users also have the option to change their mind and withdraw their approval. At the same time, they can request from each company all the data it has collected about them.
These are the strictest regulations that have ever been implemented and the Commission emphasizes that they also apply to companies that are not based in Europe. As the technology-specific website “The Verge” explains, for the huge “industry” that had been used to collect and share personal data with little or no control, the new European regulations change everything in the way targeted ads operate.
The second particularly important point is that the fines for offenders are high enough to force the entire technology community to prepare and do everything that is possible to avoid being targeted by the Commission.
This is because the fine is set at 20 million euros or 4% of the delinquent company’s global annual revenue – whichever is higher. This means that if a Silicon Valley giant breaks the rules, it will not pay 20 million euros – a rather negligible amount for such large companies – but the fine could reach billions.
For example, Apple, which in the past had 233.7 billion in annual revenue, would pay a fine of 9.3 billion dollars! Respectively, Microsoft with revenue of 93.6 billion would face a fine of $ 3.7 billion, Alphabet (Google’s parent company with annual revenue of 66 billion) would pay 2.6 billion while Facebook (40, 7 billion revenues)would pay about 1.6 billion.
These companies could afford such a fine – however they would not be happy at all.
Smaller companies, however, could hardly continue to operate after such a “penalty”. These fines are much higher than those described in the previous regulations and it is now clear that the Commission is not joking about the protection of the personal data of European users.
Thus, small and large companies have been racing lately to change their data collection regulations to avoid such an astronomical fine.
