As of 2020, have any GDPR-related court judgements been successfully enforced on companies without presence in the EU? The GDPR has been in effect for 2 years now and theoretically applies to any company on the planet which deals with personal data belonging to EU residents. But practically speaking, enforcing this law should be quite difficult, as EU authorities have zero direct enforcement power over foreign corporations without EU assets. Here's a scenario that would satisfy the requirements of this question: A website was operating outside the EU, with no EU legal entity established and no payments accepted from EU users An EU court ruled that they must still comply with GDPR because they happen to have visitors living in the EU Said website ignored the EU court ruling entirely, refusing to comply The EU managed to convince the authorities of the country where the website is located to enforce the judgement on their behalf I'm interested in any country outside of the EU, EEA or the UK where this happened.
EU Member State Data Protection Authorities (&quot;DPAs&quot;) have fined foreign legal entities (pursuant to Articles 58(2)(i) and 83 GDPR and further national provisions), however it is not publicly documented whether the specific situation you described has occured. Even if such situation would arise, I would think that it is unlikely that DPAs imposing administrative fines could enforce their (fine imposing) decisions outside the EU, even if the decision in question was confirmed by a court. For instance, in the Netherlands there is not a strong legal basis for the (mutual) recognition and enforcement of foreign administrative decisions. I could imagine that the same applies to other EU Member States. However, please note (possible) civil liability Your question seems to refer to enforcement of the GDPR under instruments of administrative / public law. Please note however that the GDPR can also be enforced by private individuals and organizations, e.g. through tortious liability claims. See for example Amsterdam District Court 2 september 2019, ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2019:6490 for a situation (albeit purely national), in which the Court awarded damages for a GDPR breach to a data subject. Possibly, a similar case could be brought against an entity outside the EU that processes data of EU data subjects, contingent upon the outcome of certain questions of International Private Law. With regard to civil damages, there is an extensive international legal framework that covers the cross-border enforcement of rewards for civil damages. Likely, such rewards for damages could more easily be enforced outside the EU. However, I must note that such (private) cross-border enforcement of the GDPR has not happened in practice (yet) either (as far as I know). (Please note that this answer assumes (per the question) that the GDPR is applicable and only deals with the question of the territorial aspects of subsequent enforcement. See about the territorial scope of the GDPR: What is the legal mechanism by which the GDPR might apply to a business with no presence in the EU?).
There is nothing in the GDPR requiring you to collect individual personally identifiable information. If the website has no need, and the website owner no desire, to collect such information, there is no requirement to do so. The GDPR requires that if such information is collected, that there is a lawful basis, and that it be handled appropriately and stored securely, and deleted when there is no longer a need to retain it, or on a proper request. If no such information is collected in the first place, all the rules about how to handle it do not apply. It is possible that some law of an individual country in the EU might mandate collection of some particular information, but I have not heard of any such requirement.
The intention of the GDPR is to minimize the amount of personally identifiable information (PII) you store. So the GDPR never tells you that you have to log certain events. The simplest way to make sure you comply with the GDPR is to simply not store any PII at all. But that might of course conflict with legitimate business interests and with other legal obligations you might have. So when you do store PII, then the GDPR regulates under which conditions you are allowed to store PII, for how long and what you are allowed to do with that PII. So when you receive a GDPR request from a customer to see their data, then you can say that you only have that one timestamp of their registration, because you didn't log their subsequent logins (assuming this is the truth). I hope your privacy policy says that you store all that PII on registration and that you have some good arguments why storing that information is a &quot;legitimate interest&quot; of your organization.
Countries, and supranational governments like the EU, have jurisdiction over companies that do business in their jurisdictions. Oracle is technically not a U.S. corporation; it's a closely related group of California and Delaware corporations. Very few companies incorporate under U.S. federal law (I believe some banking corporations are required to, but don't quote me on that). Almost all companies are incorporated under state law. However, if Oracle does business in Texas, it still has to obey Texas law. And if it does business in the EU, it still has to obey EU law. Some laws make distinctions in some corporate matters between domestic corporations (incorporated under that state's laws) and foreign corporations (incorporated under another state's laws). But if you do business in a state, including an EU member state, you still need to obey that state's general laws, including antitrust law. Short version: if you visit another country, you can't go around shooting people, then say, "your laws don't apply to me, I'm an American." Neither can a company, no matter where it's incorporated. As for stopping the merger...any country where the merging companies do business can stop the merged company from doing business there if the merger violates local law. If this is a major, commercially important region like the EU, then failure to get EU approval will stop the merger. If it's a minor territory, the company will sometimes enter into an agreement to divest itself of local assets or entities. For example, if merging Oracle and Sun would create an antitrust problem in the minicomputer repair market in Laos, the merged entities would sell off either Oracle's or Sun's Laotian minicomputer repair division.
It may be legal or it may not For example, if any of the users are in the European Union, then the GDPR applies and the person storing the information is a data controller and has legal obligations. These include, having a legitimate reason for storing them, storing them only for as long as necessary for that reason, notifying the individuals that the data is being stored and why, deleting it upon a users request etc.
There are a number of misconceptions here. GDPR does not generally impose blanket bans, but things get dicey if you're using data in a way that is not strictly necessary. Consent (freely given opt-in) is a way to continue nevertheless. A website without ads, tracking, or potentially tracking embedded content can probably work without having to ask for consent. Under the GDPR, every processing of personal data needs a purpose. This purpose must be covered by a legal basis. Some processing might be legally mandated or required by a contract with the data subject. It's also possible to base processing on a legitimate interest, but this requires a balancing test that also considers the data subject's rights and interests. As a last resort, consent can be an appropriate legal basis, but this comes with additional restrictions. Once you have a clear purpose that is covered by a legal basis, you can process the minimum data necessary to achieve the purpose. Sometimes, laws prescribe a particular legal basis. This is the case for cookies. You can use cookies (and similar technologies that access information on the end user's device) as strictly necessary to provide a service explicitly requested by the user. If you go beyond that, the ePrivacy Directive says you must obtain consent first. So for example, session cookies, shopping carts, or cookies that remember a “dark mode” preference are all perfectly fine because they are strictly necessary for something the user is trying to do. Also, you can use cookies to remember if the user gave or declined consent. On the other hand, analytics or tracking cookies are not necessary and require consent. If a website embeds third party content, this discloses personal data such as IP addresses to the third party. This disclosure requires a legal basis, most likely consent. There is case law about this regarding Facebook Like buttons on a page (→ Fashion ID case) but the same principle can be generalized to embedded Tweets or Youtube videos, images, or JavaScript files. A common way to handle this is to replace the embedded content with a placeholder, and to only load the embed once the user gives consent. But not all other domains or services are “third party” in the sense of the GDPR. When you engage a company to act as a data processor on your behalf, they are contractually bound to only use the data as instructed by you, and not for their own purposes. The GDPR allows you to outsource processing activities such as serving web content, as long as you have a suitable contract in place. Such “data processing agreements” are common for hosting providers or CDNs. When consent is to be used as a legal basis, it's important to consider the various conditions that the GDPR imposes (see Art 7 GDPR). The core principle is that consent must be freely given. You cannot make access to a site conditional on consent, so a naïve cookie wall or captive portal will be non-compliant. It's fine to force a choice, but “no” MUST be valid and possible. That consent is freely given also means that you must provide enough context for the user to make an informed decision, that the user must give consent through an unambiguous, affirmative action (consent is never the default), and that consent must be specific for a particular purpose (you can't bundle unrelated purposes). That is why modern consent management tools have multiple layers of information and allow the user to give consent for individual purposes (e.g. yes to analytics but no to ad personalization). In your particular context, you could proceed as follows: Figure out what kind of external content you're currently including. Can you enter into a data processing agreement with the external providers? If so, sign that. Can you host the content locally? This can be an easy solution except for video streams. Careful: copyright concerns might make this impossible. Can you replace the content with placeholders that only load if and when the user gives consent? That way, the rest of your site remains accessible without annoying consent walls. If the third party content is an unavoidable and essential part of your page, use an interstitial to inform the user of the risks before they proceed.
Term 1 isn't going to hold up, but that is not a GDPR matter. It's just a matter of basic consumer protection law in the EU. You can't offload responsibility for your mistakes. Looking at 2, Dale M. already pointer out that it's now how the GDPR works. You are the Data Controller. X,Y and Z are Data Processors. Article 28(1) of the GDPR is in direct conflict with your disclaimer. You accept zero responsibility, the GDPR says you are fully responsible. That's the exact opposite.
Per Art 3(2), GDPR only applies to non-European companies when their processing activities relate to the offering of goods or services to people in Europe, or when the processing activities relate to monitoring people in Europe. However, the word “offer” of this targeting criterion requires some level of intent. It is not enough for GDPR to apply that they're marketing to someone who happens to be in Europe, but GDPR would apply if they are intentionally marketing to people who are in Europe. I don't know what they are marketing, so I don't know if that would be the case here. Even if GDPR were to apply, it would not be the most appropriate law. Yes, there's the GDPR right to erasure, which applies under some conditions (though there's a pretty absolute right to opt-out from marketing). The EU's ePrivacy Directive provides more specific rules though, in particular that every such marketing email must offer a way to unsubscribe. Other countries have comparable anti-spam laws, potentially also the home country for this online service.