A new record high! However, this is not a welcome record for companies. We are talking about GDPR fines. The current GDPR violations exceed any previously known level in 2023 – according to Statista, the newly imposed record fine in the first few months of 2023 already exceeds the total for 2019, 2020, and 2021 combined! The new record fine of €1.2 billion has been imposed on Facebook. The GDPR has imposed this fine on the American company Meta, which unlawfully transferred data via the social media platform Facebook to the US.

This means that Meta, with its subsidiary Facebook, has overtaken Amazon for the first time in the unpopular ranking of the highest GDPR fines – Amazon had previously led the way with a fine of €746 million in 2021. Meta also ranks third, fourth, and fifth in terms of the highest fines to date: €405 million (Instagram 2022), €265 million (Facebook 2022), and €225 million (WhatsApp 2021).

The total fines imposed under the GDPR in the first half of 2023 amounted to €1.6 billion. Not only is the total amount of fines increasing, but individual violations are also being punished with larger sums: in 2019, for example, fines per violation averaged around €500,000, whereas in 2023 they already amount to a whopping €2.8 million. The giants Meta, Amazon, and Google occupy the top ten spots for the highest GDPR fines, with the total amount of all penalties amounting to around €3.4 billion, or 86% of the fines imposed since 2018.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU data protection regulation. Its aim is to protect personal data and regulate the unlawful processing of such data by private individuals, companies, and public institutions. Most penalties are related to the incorrect processing of personal data and the transfer of sensitive data to the US. Since the introduction of the GDPR, over 1,600 fines have already been imposed.

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