GDPR, Impactful And Showing Its Face(book)

A bit more than two months in, GDPR (shorthand for General Data Protection Regulation) is having an impact. Not surprising, as borne out by some (very) early numbers.

There was Facebook, of course, where commentary during second-quarter earnings conference calls with analysts showed that as a result of the new regulations, the firm lost about one million monthly active users in Europe.

The tally, overall, is still rather healthy, with 376 million users still extant in the region. And it pales in comparison to the 2.2 billion users listed in total. But a bump down in growth is still a bump, and, and as CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in remarks to those aforementioned analysts, GDPR remains “an important moment in our industry.” The fact remains, too, that the firm will be boosting investment in security initiatives – enough so that profitability is impacted.

The unanticipated part comes on a larger stage, perhaps. As bankinfosecurity.com noted this past week, the sheer scale of data breaches comes to a point that is referred to as the “problem unknown” stage, where — amid the 72-hour window when companies must report to authorities the knowledge of a breach — the report tallied by the ICO hit 1,750 in June, compared to 700 in May.

Observers told the site that the data initially does not necessarily point to the fact that breaches are on the rise — just that more incidents are being reported. That scramble comes amid fines that can be levied for non-compliance, which can be as much as 4 percent of a company’s annual global revenue.

Fees Under Scrutiny in the U.K.

Separately, but also in Europe, the Payment Systems Regulator, the payment watchdog in the U.K., is looking at banking services tied to processing card transactions. The review will look toward whether consumers are being treated fairly — and whether the fees that come in tandem with those processing activities result in higher costs paid by the user or consumer.