GDPR: What’s really changed so far?
The European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) officially came into force across the European Union on 25 May, with the aim of bringing laws and obligations around personal data, privacy and consent up to date for the internet age.
While organisations had years to prepare for GDPR coming into force, many appeared to panic, with internet users finding that throughout May, their email inboxes were jammed with messages from companies asking them to opt-in to keep receiving emails and provide permission for the organisations to use their data.
But, after the flurry of emails before 25 May, afterwards it all seemed to go quiet. So while GDPR might be benefiting consumers by emptying their inboxes of unwanted mail, when it comes to businesses, what’s happening with GDPR now?
This rush to ensure that users gave their consent to organisations was tied into the most highly publicised element of GDPR: that businesses must ensure that they’re compliant with the data legislation in order so that the data of consumers is kept safe.
But in the event of data being breached, stolen, or otherwise misused and the organisation is found to be non-compliant with GDPR, they risk fines from the European Union of up to four percent of global turnover. While it’s too early for any of these fines to have been imposed yet, making sure their systems were up to scratch continues to be a big project for many businesses even though the initial deadline has passed.
Away from the headline-grabbing prospect of fines, GDPR has started to have an impact on organisations elsewhere — and it isn’t just limited to Europe, as any business which has operations within the EU must be compliant.
That means the likes of Google and Facebook have found themselves having to take GDPR into consideration. It’s something Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company has been working on for a long time — at least 18 months.
“For us, it’s been super important to get it right, and we’ve always been focused on user privacy. But it’s been a big change for a lot of our partners as well, and so we are working closely with our partners and regulators and committed to doing it right,” he said on a recent earnings call, but added “it’s too early to tell” when it comes to how it has directly impacted users — and its revenue.
Meanwhile, Facebook has seemingly blamed GDPR for a decline of about a million monthly active users across Europe during the last quarter.
“It is worth noting that MAU and DAU [daily active users] in Europe were both down slightly quarter-over-quarter due to the GDPR roll-out,” said Facebook CFO David Wehner, speaking on a recent earnings call.
In addition to the numbers of monthly and daily active users going down, Facebook has partially blamed a slow down in advertising revenue growth within Europe on GDPR.
“European ad revenue growth decelerated more quickly than other regions and was impacted primarily by reduced currency tailwinds and, to a lesser extent, the roll-out of GDPR,” said Wehner.
The company has attempted to shrug it off as insignificant in the global scheme of things, but also seems to be prepared to take a larger hit in future as a result of the data protection laws.
