According to data from Atlas Vpn, in the face of the decrease in the number of lawsuits filed, the value of fines imposed on companies that have not complied with the regulation has grown by 92%. The main penalties against Notebooksbilliger.de and Clearview Ai 08 Jul 2022 Domenico Aliperto
In the first half of 2022, the value of the penalties imposed for non-compliance with the provisions of the GDPR reached a total of 97.29 million euros, with an increase of 92% compared to the first half of 2021. To say it is a report by Atlas Vpn, which analyzed the data of the Enforcementtracker platform, on which all the fines made public are recorded. The report highlights how in the first half of 2021 companies and individuals were charged a total of 50.6 million euros in penalties resulting from 215 lawsuits filed for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation. Considering that in the first half of 2022 there were 205 cases, it is clear that the severity of the violations has increased considerably. The most obvious difference between 2021 and 2022 is recorded in February, where the total amount penalized differs by almost 28 million euros. The cases of Notebooksbilliger.de and Clearview Ai Among the most striking cases, Atlas Vpn cites that of Notebooksbilliger.de. The German company had been monitoring its employees via video for at least two years without any legal basis. Thus, in June 2021, the state commissioner for data protection of Lower Saxony imposed a fine of 10.4 million euros. The cameras, judged inadmissible, recorded, among other things, workplaces, sales halls, warehouses and common areas. The company countered by stating that the surveillance aimed to prevent any theft and to trace the goods in the warehouses. However, video surveillance is only lawful when there is a justified suspicion of specific individuals. In this case, it is allowed to monitor them with cameras for a certain period. But this was not the case Notebooksbilliger.de.
In May 2022, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Clearview Ai £7.5 million for using images of people in the UK and elsewhere collected from the web and social media to create a global online database to be used to power facial recognition algorithms. Clearview Ai had collected over 20 billion images of people's faces and data from publicly available information without informing data subjects not only that their images were being collected or exploited for that purpose, but also that their online behavior was monitored to offer commercial profiling services.