With it being over two years since GDPR was implemented in the EU and EEA, the team over at Finbold has studied the fines and penalties that data protection authorities have imposed in the EU, by sourcing data from the GDPR Enforcement Tracker fines database.
Italy was the worst offender with 45,609,000 euro worth of fines over 13 cases. This figure was nearly six times the next worst offender which was Sweden. To be fair though the country with the most violations was Spain which had 72 cases - it was just that the fines there seem to be a lot lower.
The top ten EU countries with the biggest total GDPR fines are:
|
Rank |
Country |
Total Fines (€) |
No. Of Fines |
|
1 |
Italy |
45,609,000 |
13 |
|
2 |
Sweden |
7,031,800 |
4 |
|
3 |
Netherlands |
2,080,000 |
3 |
|
4 |
Spain |
1,952,810 |
76 |
|
5 |
Germany |
1,240,000 |
1 |
|
6 |
Norway |
742,060 |
8 |
|
7 |
Belgium |
717,000 |
7 |
|
8 |
Hungary |
299,300 |
6 |
|
9 |
Finland |
200,500 |
4 |
|
10 |
Ireland |
115,000 |
2 |
The report said that more than €60,181,250 was spent by companies in fines under GDPR in the EU countries, as of 2020.
The biggest crime was not having a good enough reason to process data but doing it anyway.
