Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months.
If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one.
Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.
Can you give me some examples of this please?
I think that the core problem for the Irish DPA is that they are woefully under-resourced, and they're up against the biggest companies in the world. Now, one could argue that this is the fault of the government/people and I'd agree with you, but that's a harder thing to change (Ireland was basically the only country that didn't throw their government out post the massive Covid/Ukraine inflation spike).
Additionally, the Irish DPC got involved from other data authorities, which may have caused delays.
That being said, they were dead wrong not to take on that case, as it was clear violation of GDPR. I actually worked for Meta/Facebook at this point and got drunk and bitched about this exact screen with one of their privacy lawyers. It was total non-compliance and should have been punished much harder.
Note also that the Hamburg DPA is crazy, they kept pushing compliants that were never supported by anyone else. I'm a little annoyed at noyb for not putting their complaints to the appropriate authority, but they appear to have learned better in the intervening years.
> https://archive.ph/20230123014444/https://www.irishtimes.com...
This on the other hand, is a work of opinion by a Berlin correspondent for a pretty poor newspaper. There probably is a bunch of pressure/lobbying on the DPC to avoid massive, massive fines which shouldn't happen but does everywhere.
The conceptual difference here is important. The goal should be to preserve privacy, not fine arbitrary large amounts of money. Like, sometimes you do need to fine people but personally I'd prefer auditing requirements for Meta/Google et al rather than fines.
I'm gonna need to think about this, tbh. I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the Irish DPC given the resourcing constraints and the size of their opponents. I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.
Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.
> I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.