The Arrival of GDPR Causes Major Turbulence Across The EU

The long impending GDPR compliance has finally taken effect and it took entire Europe by storm when the D-day arrived. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted by European Council in 2016 to consolidate the user privacy and protect the user data in Europe. However, the arrival of this new digital privacy and data protection law seem to have catastrophic effects on dozens of American news sites who preferred to ban their services in Europe rather than complying with the GDPR. You read that right. Some of America’s biggest news sites and online services have blocked half a billion people from accessing their services as they found it hard to comply with the stringent policies imposed by the GDPR. The names include Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News.
 

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What Is GDPR and How It Disrupts The Businesses In Europe?

GDPR is a legislation that brings a new set of rules and data protection laws to the businesses operating in the European Union. The legislation was passed in April 2016 by the European Council to ensure that the users will have more control over how their information is going to be used. GDPR imposes some stringent rules on various companies operating in Europe. The companies that don’t comply with these policies are fined heavily. The fines are so high that the companies may have to pay up to €20 million or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year. For the companies like Facebook and Amazon, that’s like billions of dollars.

So the validation of GDPR in EU that took place on May 25 has caused a major disruption in the European business scenario. Apparently, many multinational companies operating in EU have either banned their services in Europe or suspended them for the nonce.

The Impact of GDPR In EU

The validation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the European Union is more or less contributing to the estrangement of Europe from the United States of America and many other countries. Cutting Europe off from America may cause a drastic socio-economic shift across the continent. The European users will lose access to a number of websites from America and several other countries. With that be the case, it may cause conditions like in Mainland China where the users don’t have access to many famous websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Gmail. However, the motive of GDPR compliance in Europe is completely different from that in China.

Current GDPR Status In EU

The GDPR legislation was passed in April 2016 by the European Council and all the companies were given 2 years of time to get themselves GDPR compliant. 25th May was the deadline in Europe to get your company GDPR compliant which has already passed. However, it turns out that somewhat around 60-70% of the companies in Europe have not given any clearance on GDPR compliance just yet. It’s still unclear what might be the take of EU regulators on that. Although the companies in Europe that are not yet GDPR are compliant are expecting some leniency from the regulators due to their vast number, but there’s still no clarity how the regulators might react to this lack of obligation.