Complaints to a data protection official take forever, are usually dismissed at first, even if counter to published opinions or decisions such as TFA. And only if you still care after a few years of waiting and at least one appeal you might get a decision, however usually a very cheap one for the perpetrator.
I have the exact opposite impression. Even in small start-up, every new external supplier will be judged whether the is any customer data processing in the US. People are super afraid of Google analytics. If you use the Google Fonts on your website you will get an cease and desist letter in no time from scummy lawyers. You pratically need an external company to manage your cookie banner because it is a legal risk.
Google analytics and Google fonts are regularly enforced, but not by data protection officials. "Enforcement" of those is, as you've said, done by scummy private lawyers, scanning websites and sending expensive letters ("Abmahnungen") en masse. Basically, due to a weird precedent, those lawyers are allowed to give you unasked advice on your wrongdoing and billing you for it. But that is, afaik, a specialty of German law, and mostly limited to stuff that can be fully automated. So while you can scan for a website using Google Fonts, you cannot as easily scan for someone using Office365. Although you might, maybe, get a hint by looking at the DNS MX records.
Just any adress. Their point is, it needs to be an physical adress - so in case someone wants to sue the website, they have somewhere to send the physical letters to.
In other words, many people got expensive physical letters, to make it in general easier for other people to send them expensive phyical letters.
But yes, as far as I know, this only affects germans. But once we control the EU, who knows.
Don't set cookies for visitors. Notify on signup for everyone else.
So cookie banner it is and to be sure you don’t get sued you buy that elsewhere.
Speaking a as user, I don't want your company to know or do any of those things. I'm very glad these practices are getting outlawed and I'd like your marketing team to know they can get hit by a bus for all I care, the world would be a better place without their cancerous doings. Psychological warfare against the general public is despicable.
You don't need notifications for purely functional cookies. If you have a Nextcloud instance that only uses a cookie to remember your user identity throughout a login session, no notifications are required. If you also feed the value of the Nextcloud cookie into a tracking system, that's when a notification is required. And only then.
I mean, yes, that's what it used to be, pre-GDPR.
With GDPR, the data protection agencies have grown teeth. And fangs. And claws and talons.
GDPR enforcement is young, and the goal is compliance, not maximum fines. So depending on the offence and the offender, they start with a warning or a small fine. This will ratchet up and the maximum is € 10 million or 2% of the previous year's annual revenue (not profit), whichever is greater!
Microsoft's annual revenue for FY 2022 (I guess they are early) was almost $200 Billion. So the fine for them could be $4 billion. Yes, that's noticeable and not something you want to explain to your shareholders.
And of course this seems to apply to their customers, for whom margins tend to be tighter, and for whom IT is not their main business, but an operating expense in the first place. For example, Volkswaken has an operating profit of around 6-7%. So 2% of revenue is around a third of their profit. And also around a third of their entire R&D budget. Yeah, compliance is the cheaper option by far.
There were plenty of EU countries with privacy laws. The laws were all ignored by all but the largest companies in the country. Getting FAANG to take note of local law was basically impossible.
On paper, the GDPR is weaker than what it replaced in my country. I lost some privacy rights with the GDPR, and gained some bureacratics if I want my rights enforced. In practice, the GDPR gets some following, even outside the EU. It has teeth.
GDPR, mostly seems like an annoyance to developers while providing little actual benefit to users since countries aren't willing to enforce it and even if you do take it to court yourself the courts aren't doing much. In once case, a German court found that a company breached GDPR by using Mailchimp but because they stopped using Mailchimp they didn't fine them, for the breach. That is realistically a complete joke of a judgement. And honestly, there are lots of judgements that are basically similar.
The kicker is that EU companies are essentially paying to upload their trade secrets to their direct competitors in the US.
We're a minority
For things to change, there would really need to be something like:
- data protection fines the whole of the customer list of Amazon/Google/MS cloud
- data protection fines a high-profile company a lot of money for using Office365
- a court forces a public institution to cease using Office365 (no fines possible there)
- enforcement accelerates to a point where, from complaint to fine, things take only a few weeks, instead of a few years, so that lots of medium and smaller businesses are hit. Currently enforcement seems to be starting with the big cases, and being bogged down in the complexity of those.
Besides, the GDPR is not extremely clear, so setting the boundaries in a very public way is a good thing.
AFAIK, in Norway, most fines have been directed at public institutions.
Because they’re too Byzantine to make enforcement practicable, or because they’re not seen as a privacy risk (the government in Germany should know lots about you), or something else?
However, that all leads to the obvious workarounds: the official interpretation is usually the most lenient possible, compliance is put off to some time next century due to lack of personell/budget/willpower. And if something is found to be amiss, the data protection officer may order a government agency to fix whatever is wrong, but can neither fine nor discipline a civil servant. Because disciplining is up to the direct disciplinary superior, which cannot be (due to them being independent) the data protection officer.
Microsoft's incompatibility with the GDPR puts some of its customers at risk. A fine or two and businesses might stop paying for those lucrative cloud subscriptions.
Likewise, a company using O365 to store customer or employee data will get in trouble, not Microsoft for offering that service.
The €100 fine to that one website that included Google Fonts wasn't an attempt to get Google to put Google Fonts in a European holding or whatever. That was never going to happen. It was to punish that website for breaking the law.
Before anything like this will hit the news, there would first be a massive lawsuit that will probably take months or years. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft would throw lawyer money to the company involved just to make sure the lawsuit doesn't end setting a precedent against their product.
Never underestimate German courts and their willingness to uphold privacy laws when they get challenged.