Europe's Data Protection Laws Cut Data Storage By Making Information-Wrangling Pricier
The Register, Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
GDPR also slashed processing costs by over a quarter. Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has led European firms to store and process less data, recent economic research suggests, because the privacy rules are making data more costly to manage.
In a paper titled "Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from the GDPR," distributed this week via the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), monetary boffins explore the cost of privacy. They start by analyzing corporate cloud computing, citing previous research that suggests the cost of GDPR compliance ranges from $1.7 million for SMBs to $70 million for large organizations.
GDPR was enacted in 2016 and affects more than 20 million firms in dozens of countries. And since then, other countries have followed suit with their own privacy rules - all of which have economic implications.