Has there ever been a legal precedent of a company violating GDPR like this and had to pay substantial enough penalty in accordance to GDPR?
Unless we make the penalty extremely harsh, change will not happen in this instance. The selling of PID is far too profitable to be deterred by mere fine
Sure, it'll have a "material impact" at only 4%, but a determined company could just do it anyway. This doesn't actually force them to stop.
GM has 10B profits for 170B revenue so we are talking about 70% of their annual profit. Not enough to destroy the company but certainly not small for a single violation on a subset of their customers. For tech companies however, 4% is less threatening.
As I understand it, we are talking about 4% per country of the EU, which in many cases can destroy profits made in a country for years and can certainly wipe any profit made from selling that data.
Q1 the company is hit with a 4% fine of global revenue, let's say it's Meta with its US$134 billion of revenue, the fine is US$5.36 billion, they don't change course and Q2 gets hit with another 4%, then Q3, then Q4 ending the fiscal year with ~US$22 billion of fines, that's 56% of their net income, it's an absurd amount that no shareholder will be happy about. Let's say they continue even after that, major shareholders will be up in arms about how the fuck can management be allowing 56% of their global net income to go to the EU's budget through fines.
If it gets egregious enough and some company does think they can continue the infringement and bad behaviour the EU will just roll out another regulation to kneecap those companies even harder.
I agree with you that companies need to feel the heat to behave, if not then we just get the unethical/immoral branch of capitalism, at the same time the system right now is dominated by these elite capitalists which will fight tooth-and-nail to avoid any kind of punishment through legislation, get too harsh too quickly and we will see those we are trying to punish banding together to fight whole governments to push their agenda, they have the power to do it you just have to look at the USA to see how much mega corporations can bend a democratic government to their will.
something more incentivizing than a mere fine wants to be levied upon corporations to get them to follow the law, rather than just saving up money to pay an expected fine.
Also speeding becomes reckless driving (with jail time) and parking in dumb places gets your car towed (and possibly damaged) so banking in money to avoid rules isn’t always exactly a winning strategy.
But, putting on my economist hat; I can assure you that exponentially increasing fines will at some point create enough deterrence against such actions. Or better yet, it will be socially optimal for those idiots to keep breaking rules.