Facebook’s WhatsApp just got a $270M privacy fine — global regulators are doubling down

GDP-R-you-ready-to-rumble… EU regulators slapped Facebook’s WhatsApp with a $270M fine this week for violating GDPR. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, aka: the world’s toughest data privacy law, forces companies to get permission to collect and share users’ data, protect that data, and report any breaches. That makes it harder for companies to monetize valuable user info (think: Facebook and ad targeting). According to regulators, WhatsApp shared data with FB and Insta without users’ permission.

Cue the GDPR yellow cards… But instead of a warning, companies are now getting fat fines. When GDPR went into effect three years ago, enforcement was minimal: European regulators had only issued around $86M worth of GDPR fines by the start of 2020. Since then, that figure has skyrocketed to $1.5B. Privacy activists have praised recent fines, but some say they’re still not big enough: For context: GDPR allows fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue, which means fines for Amazon could hit $15.4B. Some of the heftiest GDPR fines since 2019:

• France fined Google $57M for illegal data processing.
• Germany dinged H&M $42M for secretly collecting employee data.
• The UK docked Marriott $24M and British Airways $26M.
• Luxembourg fined Amazon a whopping $886M for a data breach.