Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, a Sydney-based senior reporter for Mlex, and it's great to have your company.

This is a special edition of Emlex's usual weekly podcast to accompany a rather special report

put together by seven of our reporters in London, Brussels and Berlin.

The special report, titled Is the GDPR Doing Its Job, takes a deep dive into Europe's flagship

privacy law since its introduction

a little more than four years ago.

The General Data Protection Regulation is often quoted as a global standard for privacy law

when regulators around the world consider national measures.

But is it working? That's exactly the question I'll be putting to my

colleagues Matthew Newman, Sam Clark and Nicholas Wallace, just three of the reports, many authors

in just a moment. We'll discuss why Spain has issued 474 privacy penalties compared to Estonia and Slovenia, which have issued none.

And for the real legal nerds listening, which articles of the GDPR are the subject of the most

violations?

Now, this report has some great facts and figures peppered throughout, so let's start with

some of those main findings and trends. What statistical nuggets nuggets can you offer our listeners, Matthew, in terms of big

themes and sectors that are being targeted most perhaps? Yeah, I think one of the important things

to note is that GDPR has been criticized a lot as not having sharp enough teeth.

And what we've seen in this report is that over the years,

the enforcement has ramped up significantly.

So we've started out with a small number of fines,

and then the data protection authorities really started ramping up their enforcement with just the number, the sheer

number of fines has gone up. So I was in 2021, there was 538 fines total. And this year we're

...