Some of these eventually do lead to the company paying up. In the U.S. it settled with the FTC in a 2019 case where it paid up $5 billion and put new privacy practices in place.
Fines are calculated on a sliding scale but can amount to up to 30% of a company’s sales in the relevant category, the European Commission says.
The fine comes at a time when tides are changing fast in politics, not least because of the changing of the guard in the U.S., with the executive and legislative branches now all controlled by the Republicans.