Data pro­tec­tion 1. Loc­al data pro­tec­tion laws and scope Data pro­cessing op­er­a­tions are gov­erned by the Fed­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Act (Bundes­datens­chutzge­setz – BDSG) of 30 June 2017, as last amended...

1st edi­tion 2020All EU Mem­ber States have been re­quired to ap­ply the Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion ("GDPR", Reg­u­la­tion (EU) 2016/679) since 25 May 2018. After a cau­tious ini­tial peri­od, the EU data pro­tec­tion au­thor­it­ies ("DPA") have in­creased their fin­ing activ­ity sig­ni­fic­antly. This GDPR En­force­ment Track­er Re­port aims to provide you with valu­able in­sights in­to the fin­ing activ­it­ies of all EU DPAs un­der the GDPR, as well as the ICO's prac­tice in the United King­dom. Our ana­lys­is is based on the pub­licly avail­able data on fines that we col­lect and com­pile at www.en­force­ment­track­er.com. We in­tend to pub­lish an­nu­al edi­tions of this re­port, and we ex­pect that the rel­ev­ance of in­sights will stead­ily in­crease as more data on fines be­comes avail­able.Over­view, coun­try and sec­tor ap­proachIn search of guid­ance on how to op­tim­ise its own data pro­tec­tion strategy and pri­or­it­ise data pro­tec­tion meas­ures, a com­pany will nat­ur­ally want to look at its peers and the com­pet­ent au­thor­it­ies' prac­tice. This holds true both in terms of busi­ness sec­tors and jur­is­dic­tion. Kick­ing off with an over­all sum­mary on the ex­ist­ing fines ("Num­bers and Fig­ures"), we have cor­res­pond­ingly di­vided the fines in­to the fol­low­ing busi­ness sec­tors and con­sidered the re­spect­ive fines' ori­gins:Fin­ance, in­sur­ance and con­sultingAc­com­mod­a­tion and hos­pit­al­ity­Health careIn­dustry, com­merce and real es­tate­Media, tele­coms and broad­cast­ing­Pub­lic sec­tor­Trans­port­a­tion and en­ergy­In­di­vidu­als and private as­so­ci­ation­sEm­ploy­er­sY­our takeawaysThe in-depth ana­lys­is per­mits first con­clu­sions to be drawn as to which busi­ness sec­tors at­trac­ted par­tic­u­larly hefty fines. We have also ana­lysed the DPAs' reas­on­ings for the fines. These as­pects to­geth­er al­low us to provide you with key takeaways for each busi­ness sec­tor. Apart from the law­ful­ness of each data pro­cessing op­er­a­tion, bol­ster­ing data se­cur­ity should re­main in the spot­light for every or­gan­isa­tion. Lit­ig­a­tion in data pro­tec­tion is set to in­crease in the near fu­ture. Or­gan­isa­tions that main­tain up-to-date se­cur­ity meas­ures will be best pre­pared for the fu­ture and for po­ten­tial lit­ig­a­tion.

We live in an era of rap­id tech­no­lo­gic­al de­vel­op­ment. Though this provides hu­man­ity with amaz­ing op­por­tun­it­ies to en­hance our stand­ard of liv­ing, it also forces law­makers to work around the clock to ana­lyse...