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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

So 3 enforcements in Germany in all of 2022, and the highest fine in Germany was 35mil. 35mil is how much for Microsoft? The yearly Office 365 fees of one of their DAX customers?

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The possible fine for Microsoft would be 4% of the sales revenue of the whole company, which would amount to 6.8 billion dollars (at 170 billion dollars revenue in 2021)

The big fish all have their EU branches incorporated in Ireland for tax reasons. Filter by Ireland and you'll see some larger fines and some more well-known company names. And even then, it's a well-known contention within the EU that the Irish data protection authority is dragging their feet on investigations and fines because of the "tax reasons" part.

It's nothing, but once one of their customers gets a 5 millioj euro fine for using Office365 for sensitive data, the impact will be significantly higher. Microsoft can take the hit but most of its customers can't.

Microsoft's incompatibility with the GDPR puts some of its customers at risk. A fine or two and businesses might stop paying for those lucrative cloud subscriptions.

This will literally, not figuratively, but -literally- never happen. A smaller business will never be punished as a signal to Microsoft.

A websites using wordpress got fined for including google fonts. Not the organization that provides wordpress using google fonts by default.

Likewise, a company using O365 to store customer or employee data will get in trouble, not Microsoft for offering that service.

That's not what's being discussed. My comment asserts with certainty that a small business will never be punished as leverage against the upstream big corp.

It's not Microsofts fault if customers use it to store GDPR relevant data. It's Microsofts customers using them as an external data processor. It's the companies that are using O356 for such data that will get fined.

The fine is not to send a signal to Microsoft. The fine is a punishment for letting Microsoft process personal information when it's know that they do so in a way that violates the GDPR.

The €100 fine to that one website that included Google Fonts wasn't an attempt to get Google to put Google Fonts in a European holding or whatever. That was never going to happen. It was to punish that website for breaking the law.

Before anything like this will hit the news, there would first be a massive lawsuit that will probably take months or years. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft would throw lawyer money to the company involved just to make sure the lawsuit doesn't end setting a precedent against their product.

Never underestimate German courts and their willingness to uphold privacy laws when they get challenged.

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