Word has it, Reuters was all over this scoop and they mentioned that this fine is a first for the European Commission. Yup the EU General Court said the European Commission messed up by sending some personal data of this German guy over to the United States without taking the proper precautions.
Here’s the deal: the German dude signed up for this conference organized by the European Commission and used the “Sign in with Facebook” option on the conference’s website. Now the EU’s data protection rules aka GDPR are some of the toughest out there – they can slap fines on organizations of up to 4% of their yearly revenue for not playing by the rules.
. So get this: a big court just ordered the top dog in the European Union to cough up €400 (that’s around $410) to a German fella for breaking its own data protection laws né?. But here’s the kicker – he found out that his IP address, browser, and device info got shipped off to companies in the US like Amazon (the host of the conference website) and Meta (the brains behind Facebook), breaking the rules under the EU’s data privacy laws.
Fast forward to Wednesday, and the EU General Court dropped the hammer on the European Commission, saying they really messed up by violating the data privacy rules that cover all 27 European countries
