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Comment by arez | Hacker News Reader

Maybe nobody cares because nobody got any fines maybe. This could be different with GDPR. Time will tell how hard they will enforce these rules, but it could be very harsh and very expensive for some people.

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Agreed. GDPR replaces the current Directive and the various member state laws implementing it. GDPR's requirements are (making up a number) 80% or 90% already required by current laws. It's just that the fines were small. GDPR allows fines of up to 4% of annual revenue for the corporate group. So that's why it's getting so much attention. Large multinationals can't afford to ignore such a fine. The reality is probably that the enforcement authorities would only be able to hand out so many mult-million dollar fines (and fight the ensuing battle) at a time. We'll see what enforcement really looks like over time and that'll indicate how serious this is all taken.

It is companies like Cambridge Analytica, Google and others that caused this law change. In general the EU countries tries to leave the market to develop on it's own without interfering. However when there are a feeling that the market is doing the wrong thing, someone feels there needs to be a correction of ways and then we end up with things like this.

I'm sure someone once said "This is why we can't have nice things".

People got fined with the previous regime too, you can read in english about the fines levied by ICO in the UK, for example[0].

GDPR is scarier because the fines look higher and uniform across the EU, as far as I can tell.

[0] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/05/ico_finally_delivers...

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