Have you noticed the increasingly-complex cookie disclosure forms popping up on even the most unassuming website? These expanded forms aren’t present because digital businesses have suddenly decided informing customers about their data collection practices is an ethical imperative. Instead, these companies are most likely working with customers in both the U.S. and the EU, and they find themselves facing significant backlash if they aren’t following strict transparency rules.
These GDPR rules define potentially devastating penalties for unassuming companies, and these penalties can come for the most unexpected reasons–if you don’t know the rules.
What Is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
GDPR is a data privacy and security standard with jurisdiction in the European Union (EU) with a foundation in foregrounding consumer rights over protecting their personal information.
In some cases, these standards are rather restrictive, especially when compared to other standards worldwide. In other cases, however, these laws create a clear understanding of how businesses must interact with customers in a more equitable and respectful data marketplace.
At the heart of the law are seven principles of data protection. These principles are:
- Lawfulness, Fairness, and Transparency: Businesses must process the personal data from consumers and must be done so lawfully and transparently. Data processing must occur within the lawful boundaries of GDPR.
- Purpose Limitation: Personal information may only be collected and processed for clearly specified purposes, made explicit to the consumer and for no reason other than those purposes.
- Data Minimization: Businesses may only collect personal information from relevant and adequate consumers for the stated purposes of that collection and may not collect data for future processing purposes (including sale to third parties).
- Accuracy: Businesses must take any reasonable, necessary step to ensure accurate customer data. This includes promptly updating consumer data if and when consumers contact the business to update their information.
- Storage Limitation: Stored data shall only be stored so long as it is needed for stated business purposes (with certain exceptions for historical or research applications). Otherwise, the business must delete the data once it has fulfilled its purpose.
- Integrity and Confidentiality: A business must implement security, privacy and integrity controls so that consumer data remains confidential and protected against unauthorized disclosure, theft, alteration, or destruction.
- Accountability: All businesses operating within EU jurisdiction must demonstrate compliance with GDPR through practices like creating dedicated Data Protection Officer (DPO) positions, inventorying data systems, and performing assessments and audits.
While the GDPR regulations break down these principles into finer details, it is within these line items that compliance and penalties are assessed.
What Are the Fines Associated with GDPR Non-Compliance?
To put it bluntly, GDPR fines are no joke. Part of what makes compliance with GDPR requirements so important is that fines levied aren’t rated on a flat scale. As such, it’s much more difficult for vastly wealthy businesses to avoid significant penalties.
Generally, GDPR divides their penalty structure into two different tiers:
- Lesser Infringements apply to regulations for securing and protecting data and laws around organizations that certify and monitor businesses under GDPR. In this lesser tier, non-compliance could result in fines up to €10 million or 2% of the company’s worldwide annual revenue, whichever is higher.
- Serious Infringements apply to any breach of the foundational principles of GDPR, including failure to process data lawfully and transparently; failure maintains accurate consumer data; failure to process data securely and well within defined business purposes; disregarding the rights of consumers to know and correct data collected by your business; or, transfer of data to third parties outside the EU to avoid GDPR jurisdiction. Penalties at this tier may result in fines of up to €20 million or 4% of the company’s worldwide annual revenue, whichever is greater.
While 2%-4% may not seem like much, this fine is per event. And, within EU regulations, some of the most significant fines come from failure to maintain honesty and transparency with consumers, including attempting to obfuscate data collection purposes or process data outside the bounds of clearly-defined business purposes.
What Are Some of the Highest GDPR Fines (as of 2022)?
It may not be surprising to many of us, but lately, tech companies have started increasing their data-gathering processes to incredible, perhaps unethical levels. For businesses outside of the EU, the cost of maintaining a presence within the EU has been a scaling back or mitigation of collection processes that are accepted elsewhere.
This has led, in turn, to some of the most significant fines for tech companies that we’ve seen. Some of the most expensive fines, as of June 2022, are the following:
- Amazon: In 2021, Amazon announced in an earnings report that it had been levied a fine totaling €746 million, based on disclosures (or lack thereof) connected to data collecting and processing practices.
- WhatsApp: A few months after the Amazon fine, Ireland levied another penalty against WhatsApp for lack of legal justification of their data processing practices. Their total fine amounted to €225 million.
- Google (Ireland): The French data protection authority fined Google Ireland on January 6, 2022 for €90 million for failure to provide users with options to refuse cookies properly. In short, Google made it much simpler for users to accept cookies for marketing refusals but much harder to refuse them (a common tactic for businesses attempting to circumvent GDPR rules).
- Facebook (Meta): Much like Google Ireland, Facebook (Meta) earned a €60 million fine for building cookie acceptance forms that seemed to provide no option to refuse cookies.
- Google: Familiar face for GDPR fines, this €60 million fine was a parallel penalty with its sister office (Google Ireland) for improper and opaque cookie forms.
There have been some criticisms about the equality of applying penalties across the EU, but this criticism seems to lead certain jurisdictions to seek more drastic penalties for non-compliance. Case in point, the top penalty (Amazon) is almost double the next four penalties combined.
Maintain GDPR Compliance With Lazarus Alliance
Businesses with any foothold in a country within the EU are already facing the pressure of GDPR compliance. Audit logging, critical privacy controls, consent and opt-in forms and more are all part of this package, and any bit of data you collect from customers in the EU will adhere to this compliance structure.
It’s important to understand that you don’t have to go it alone. The experts at Lazarus Alliance can help.
Working With GDPR Compliance Requirements?
Call Lazarus Alliance at 1-888-896-7580 or fill in this form.
What Is Autonomous Malware?
We’re reaching the end of 2025, and looking ahead to 2026, most experts are discussing the latest threats that will shape the year ahead. This year, we’re seeing a new, but not unexpected, shift to autonomous threats driven by state-sponsored actors and AI. With that in mind, a new generation of threats, broadly known as...Continue reading→
What CISA’s Emergency Directive 26-01 Means for Everyone
In mid-October 2025, the CISA issued one of its most urgent orders yet: Emergency Directive 26-01. The directive calls on all Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to immediately mitigate vulnerabilities in devices from F5 Networks following a state-sponsored breach of F5’s systems and access to portions of BIG-IP source code and vulnerability data. The event...Continue reading→
Cybersecurity and Vetting AI-Powered Tools
A recent exploit involving a new AI-focused browser shone a light on a critical problem–namely, that browser security is a constant issue, and AI is just making that threat more pronounced. Attackers discovered a way to use that browser’s memory features to implant hidden instructions inside an AI assistant. Once stored, those instructions triggered unwanted...Continue reading→
Shutdown Security And Cyber Vulnerability
When the federal government shuts down, the public sees closed monuments, unpaid workers, and halted programs. What they do not see is the silent surge of cyberattacks targeting agencies already operating on fumes. During the most recent shutdown, attacks against U.S. government systems spiked by nearly 85%. Cybersecurity failures during government disruptions rarely start with...Continue reading→
Identity and the Shift from Malware
The world of cyber threats is rapidly evolving, and while we can see these changes more generally, it’s always crucial to understand them concretely. As the 2025 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report shows us, the landscape of our industry is changing. We’re digging into this report to discuss a challenging trend: the move of hackers foregoing...Continue reading→
Maintaining Compliance Against Prompt Injection Attacks
The increasing adoption of AI by businesses introduces security risks that current cybersecurity frameworks are not prepared to address. A particularly complex emerging threat is prompt injection attacks. These attacks manipulate the integrity of large language models and other AI systems, potentially compromising security protocols and legal compliance. Organizations adopting AI must have a plan...Continue reading→
Are We Already Talking About CMMC 3.0?
The ink has barely dried on the CMMC final rule, and already the defense contracting community is buzzing with speculation about what comes next. Just when contractors thought they had a moment to catch their breath after years of regulatory limbo, whispers of CMMC 3.0 have begun circulating through the industry. But is this just...Continue reading→
Centralizing Identity-Based Risk
As the traditional network boundary dissolves and remote work becomes standard practice, identities are the major frontier for security. Whether we’re talking about human users, service accounts, or machine identities, these have emerged as both the primary access mechanism and the most targeted attack vector. It has become imperative for providers to centralize identity management...Continue reading→
Deviation and Significant Change Requests in FedRAMP: A Comprehensive Guide
FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services used by federal agencies. While the program’s rigorous baseline requirements ensure consistent security, the reality is that this consistency calls for a little flexibility. This is where deviation requests and significant change requests come into play. These two...Continue reading→
The Costs of Compliance and Data Breaches
Data is possibly one of the most valuable assets any organization holds. Customer information, employee records, and proprietary business intelligence present challenges because the data flowing through modern enterprises represents both significant opportunities and serious risks. Businesses face a challenging balance: investing in compliance measures to protect sensitive information while also preparing for the real...Continue reading→
Related Posts