5th Anniversary GDPR Comment
- Harry Keen, CEO and Co-Founder at Hazy
- 19.05.2023 03:00 pm #data
The fifth anniversary of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a poignant time for reflection. World events and an unprecedented reliance on technology has seen the last five years rival decades worth of progression. But what baggage have we inherited with that progression? An uncontrollable lack of knowledge on how to manage and regulate new, disruptive technologies and how to safeguard invaluable customer data.
Since 25th May 2018, over 1,600 fines have been issued to companies, organisations and private individuals for breaching these regulations for a combined sum of €2.78bn – and counting. Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Google, and subsidiaries of these major companies have all been hit with hefty fines into the €100’s of millions because of GDPR breaches. Many assume technology giants have the expertise and resource to mitigate breaches, but they have been on the same learning curve as everyone else, as technology has radically outpaced regulation.
With the explosion in generative AI, more scrutiny on how companies use publicly available data will rise to the surface. We’ve already seen Italy’s data protection authority order OpenAI to stop processing locals’ data for the AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Training large generative AI models based on publicly available data is a new data privacy conundrum, and I don’t expect this to be the last example we see in the coming weeks and months.
The technology industry must work closely with regulators to redress the current imbalance between the rate of innovation and ability to regulate technology, but not stifle how it creatively evolves. Five weeks feels like five years now, and only through continued collaboration and consistent conversation between businesses, regulators, and governments can we strive for a future where customer data is safeguarded effectively in an increasingly digital world.
