An analysis by Atlas VPN reveals that GDPR fines hit a total of €97m in the first half of 2022, an increase of 92% over H1 2021.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in the EU that controls how all personal data on EU citizens is collected and processed.
The legislation covers various privacy aspects, from cookies to monitoring employees in the workplace.
Atlas VPN said the data for the analysis was extracted from Enforcementtracker.
Companies and individuals were charged a total of €50.6m in GDPR penalties in H1 2021. On the other hand, legal cases slightly decreased from 215 in 2021 to 205 in 2022.
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Atlas VPN instanced the type of cases that attract the most severe penalties.
In June 2021, the State Commissioner for Data Protection of Lower Saxony imposed a fine of €10.4m on notebooksbilliger.de AG. The German company had monitored its employees by video for at least two years without any legal basis.
The inadmissible cameras recorded workplaces, sales rooms, warehouses, and common areas. The company countered by stating that surveillance aimed to prevent and investigate crimes and track goods in warehouses.
However, video surveillance is only lawful when justified suspicion against specific individuals exists. If that is the case, it is allowed to monitor them with cameras for a particular period. Yet, in this case, the monitoring was not limited to specific employees or a time.
In May 2022, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK fined Clearview AI Inc £7.5m for using images of people in the UK and elsewhere collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition.
Clearview AI Inc has collected more than 20 billion images of people’s faces and data from publicly available information. It did not inform any persons that their images were being collected or used this way.
In addition, the company effectively monitors the behaviour of those individuals and offers it as a commercial service.
Most GDPR fines are much smaller, as can be seen in the Enforcementtracker database.
