Schrems: ‘Industry is portraying GDPR as stupid and unworkable’

Max Schrems, chairman of the Austrian privacy interest group Noyb, argues that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t work because of political pressure on supervisory authorities. “Major players think they can do whatever they want, because they employ 500 lawyers,” he says.

In an interview with Belgian news outlet De Tijd, Schrems states that privacy should be as normal as hygiene in a restaurant, or the safety of a building. He claims that the industry has succeeded in portraying the GDPR as “stupid and unworkable”.

Thanks to his foundation Noyb, Schrems has already brought numerous cases to court, resulting in €1.6 billion ($1.73 billion) in fines for companies and organizations in violation of the GDPR. And he intends to bring even more cases before court.

“We have around eight hundred files pending. Many of them have to do with cookie settings on websites. People hate that. I think that we have imposed around €1.6 billion in fines so far as a result of our complaints,” he told De Tijd.

The Noyb chairman argues there’s no legal domain with such poor compliance and enforcement as the GDPR.

“That has a lot to do with a certain culture. People often say that ordinary people are not concerned with privacy. But that’s exactly the case: they shouldn’t be concerned with it. It should be as normal as hygiene in a restaurant or the safety of a building or a train. That’s where we need to go,” the privacy activist ads.

Schrems notes that the blame is often placed on users, for example because they haven’t read the privacy policy of online services. Because of their busy lives, people ignore reading these documents. “Literally no one does that. We just need to make sure there are basic rules in place that are complied with by all players,” he says.

The GDPR was adopted in the European Parliament with 90% of the votes. Nevertheless, Schrems says in the interview that more and more privacy supervisory authorities are telling him that they were only appointed after they promised their government not to take too much action. The tech industry has also managed to dismiss the legislation as “stupid and unworkable”.

“They are doing everything they can to make GDPR look bad, while they are simply out to get your data without any legal basis,” Schrems concludes.