I agree that businesses who unlawfully sell your data or do not implement a minimum of security measures should be punished hard.
I also agree that a flat 5000 € is problematic. Not because I believe that breaking the law shouldn't be punished. It's because you also get punished if you protect the data and respect your customers, but you don't document the thousand things you must document as a small business.
I don't know if you ever looked at GDPR, but that does not distinguish between a company with five employees and 50,000 employees.
The company with 5 employees must exactly (!!!) implement the same audit trail and processes that the 50,000 employee company has to do. Or worse, there's literally no difference between you founding a company and Facebook.
This shit gets extremely overwhelming extremely fast and that's just killing small businesses.
As someone with experience with it, I heartedly disagree. It’s not that hard to not invade user privacy. You have to go out of your way to be invasive, just respect your users and collect as little data possible. That’s truly the way to go and reduces your liability in a multitude of ways, including protecting you of data breaches (if you don’t keep the data, there’s nothing to steal).
Record of processing activities, data processing agreements, consent documentation, technical and organisational measures, data protection impact assessment, data retention and deletion concepts, legal basis documentations, etc. etc.
Yeah, but basically all of those are either standard for SMEs or no-ops.
For instance, if I run a bakery and sell baked goods online, I'm probably using Shopify who comply with this with one button.
Even if I built the baking website myself, all I need is email address and physical address to send delicious baked goods to you. I need to keep the payment records for a long time (for dispute prevention if nothing else) but that's it.
Where is the GDPR hassle in this case?
Just stop collecting data you don't need (or make sure it's for a good reason, like fraud prevention) and you'll be fine.
If said bakery creates accounts, it's a little more involved but basically you just need to implement soft delete to comply with your obligations.
I'm not sure this is a massive hit, can you help me understand what SMEs exactly are going to be hit by complex GDPR compliance?
No, a bakery using Shopify will not spare them having these documents. You show a respectable amount of ignorance only to then claim GDPR won't be a hassle in this case. It absolutely is a hassle, which you would know, had you familiarized yourself with the subject.
Even stating "just stop collecting data you don't need" shows, that you did not care to read my response before you replied to it, and how little you generally know about the topic.
Not repeating what I said, I will add this: if you do collect personal data (and you WILL if you do anything online, write invoices or just have a security camera on premises) than you will have to have these documents ready.
Most of the information relates to online marketing, which does tend to come with more GDPR compliance requirements. My wife runs a business through Shopify and the only thing we need to worry about is email addresses.
Can you help me understand what you see as the issues around GDPR compliance here?
