zlacker

>>grabeh+(OP)
For those of you understandably intimidated by the GDPR regulations themselves, here's a good summary in plain English: https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain-eng...

The UK's ICO also has a good structured summary: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

In general I agree with the sentiments in this article. I've probably spent a total of three to four days reading around the GDPR and I don't really see what's special about this law other than it's imposing decent standards on what was in effect a wildly unregulated industry in people's personal data. If you have a broad distrust of any government activity then I suppose any new laws with "fines up to €X" might feel like "I run a small site on a Digital Ocean droplet and I'm at risk of a €2m fine out of the blue." But that doesn't make it true.

>>frereu+N2
The amount of discretion and lack of clarity in the penalties is part of the problem. It opens you up to risk based on the whims of politics and the regulators and increases uncertainty. Laws should be clear, limited, and understandable - this is not.

>>danthe+z4
In an ideal world, yes. But that leads you down a Kafkaesque hole of bureaucracy - at some point you have to stop adding detail and leave things open to interpretation. There are plenty of laws out there with fines "up to €X" and, from my limited experience, I don't think the GDPR is especially ambiguous compared to others.

>>frereu+b5
Well, lots of ends open to interpretation, and $20 mln fine - so obviously nothing to care about! Hysteria!

>>kingof+G5
Maximum possible fine for repeated worst possible violation after ignoring previous attempts at regulation and not making changes after previous smaller fines.

It's not a minimum.

>>DanBC+t6
It takes time, and real money to be compliant, and getting slow on this quite plausibly can make one a repeat offender. You can, of course, say "don't be slow then", however, when for an out-of-EU entity (be it biz, or NGO) simple math doesn't show it is worth the effort, then it makes perfect sense to stop offering services to EU. Which is a side effect of the legislation. OP apparently understands it puts GDPR in a bad light, so he says about "overreaction" in every topic related, and this post is likely comes as the response to the latest one.

>>kingof+59
But merely being a repeat offender isn't enough to trigger the maximum fine.

You'd have to be a consistant repeat offender, with no effort made at remediation, with no cooperation with the regulator, and probably handling sensitive or financial data.

Here's a list of recent actions taken. I think the current maximum fine is £500,000. Have a look through a few of these hopefully it's somewhat reassuring.

https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/

>>DanBC+2c
Note that this is the UK agency, you might see different behaviors if you scanned the Belgian regulators enforcement list.