EDJNet Newsletter: Fines to Big Tech companies over data protection violations

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24 November 2021

Hello, and welcome to the news and tools delivery from EDJNet.

The EU Open Data Days are ongoing this week, bringing together for the first time the EU DataViz Conference and the EU Datathon. This afternoon Matteo Moretti from our member Sheldon.studio will present EDJNet's investigation Glocal Climate Change. You can follow the event online from here, along with many other inspiring panels and presentations.

In the meantime, our pilot project Mapping Diversity won the main award for data journalism in Italy, the Data Journalism Award assigned by Festival Glocal – we look forward to further expanding it in the coming months!

If you like what you read, you can forward this newsletter to a friend – and don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

Stories

The EU faces off with Big Tech: GDPR’s enforcement enters its final phase

Member states have imposed 880 sanctions since the the EU's General Data Protection Regulation was introduced in May 2018. However, the EU needs to commit to it with greater investment and cooperation from all its members, reports Álvaro Merino from El Orden Mundial.

GDPR conferred on the member states the power to issue warnings and fines. The exact amount is decided by each national agency.
Spain has issued more fines than any other country, followed by Italy and Romania.
A total of €1.3bn has been collected since May 2018. Authorities in Luxembourg and Ireland, which host many of the largest tech corporations in Europe, fined Amazon with €746m and Whatsapp with €226m.
The combined cost of all the EU’s data protection agencies rose from €162m in 2016 to €295m in 2021. There is still, however, a large disparity in spending between member states.

Read the full story >

All our articles can be freely republished or reused. Some are available in Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Interested? Write to us!

In the past weeks,

🇪🇺 Investigate Europe and 🇩🇪 Der Tagesspiel reused our story on cross-border trains
🇮🇹 Il Manifesto republished our story on tobacco lobbying
🇫🇷 France24 reused our story on beach erosion
🇷🇴 Ziarul Financiar reused our story on trains vs. flights

Our pick

Derailed: The desolate state of European railways

Investigate Europe checked the status of European railways and searched for the reasons that many plans and announcements have not come to life. Who blocks them? And where has the money gone instead?

Vaccinating Europe’s undocumented: A policy scorecard

The first collaborative data journalism project of the Lighthouse Reports looked at how easy or difficult it is for undocumented migrants to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in Europe, at least on paper.

From our partners at the European Data News Hub

World needs trillions to face climate threat: draft UN report

Helping vulnerable nations cope with the multiplier effect of climate change will require trillions of dollars, not the billions on the table at COP26, a draft UN report reveals.

Tools and Tips

New repository: boundaries and centres of administrative and statistical units in Europe

We have published some new datasets on our GitHub, created by Giorgio Comai (OBC Transeuropa). They provide concordance between local administrative units (LAUs) and NUTS regions, which is so often an obstacle for data journalism projects looking at local and/or geographical data.

The repository also includes the population-weighted centres of European LAUs, which is useful for many kinds of data analyses or visualizations (Giorgio explained the process here).

You can check the documentation here and the full repository here.

From the data journalism community

Survey State of data journalism
DataJournalism.com has launched a survey on the state of data journalism in 2021. You can take part in their analysis here, it should take 10-15 minutes.

Award European Press Prize
Applications are open for European Press Prize 2022. There are three categories: Investigative Reporting, Distinguished Reporting and Innovation Award.
👉 The deadline is 10 December. More information here.

Grant Union is Strength
The initiative will select and support 20 teams made of 1 French+1 European journalist, both aged 30 at most. Each team will produce two stories covering projects that are supported by the European Union’s cohesion policy in France and Europe. The initiative is promoted by Slate.fr, which will also provide some mentorship.
👉 The deadline is 20 December. More information here.

You are free to reuse and republish all the content available on EDJNet. If you’d like to know more, check our terms of use or contact us (info@europeandatajournalism.eu).

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