noyb, a European privacy enforcement non-profit organization which focuses on commercial privacy issues on a European level, has filed ten GDPR complaints with the Austrian Data Protection Authority, on behalf of ten users which it represents, against eight online streaming companies for violations of Article 15. "As GDPR foresees € 20 million or 4% of the worldwide turnover as a penalty, the theoretical maximum penalty across the 10 complaints could be €18.8 billion," says noyb. According to Max Schrems, noyb's Director, all those companies (i.e., Amazon, Apple, DAZN, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flimmit, Netflix) have been tested to check their compliance of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) "right to access" provision described in the EU regulation's Article 15. The "right to access" grants all EU citizens the "right to get a copy of all raw data that a company holds about the user, as well as additional information about the sources and recipients of the data, the purpose for which the data is processed or information about the countries in which the data is stored and how long it is stored." After testing the eight companies "right to access" compliance, noyb found out that none of the eight streaming companies were fully compliant with Schrems going as far as to say that they were all engaging in "structural violation" of the EU data protection legislation. There's more to this post on OUR FORUM.

The EU Copyright Directive has made a lot of waves lately given that many fear that some of its provisions will lead to increased censorship, with almost 4.5 million Europeans signing a change.org petition to stop Article 13. This article was the one that attracted almost everyone's attention seeing that it will require large online platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to always keep an eye out on what their users are uploading and block all copyrighted items such as videos, images, and text. The other controversial article part of the EU Copyright Directive is Article 11, a provision which will force news aggregators to pay the copyright holders a fee for every news item they link to. Google, one of the most heated critics of the two provisions, is now testing a new search engine results page (SERP) template where the EU Copyright Directive is applied to the listed search results "to understand what the impact of the proposed EU Copyright Directive would be to our users and publisher partners," according to Search Engine Land. EU Copyright Directive will turn SERPs into a ghost town according to Google. As the SERP screenshots show, Google's search results will look like a deserted town, with no article titles, no images, and no news summaries, or "like pages that have failed to completely load" as Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling very appropriately describes them. Learn more on OUR FORUM.