The Osano Privacy Enforcement Tracker Is Here: Fines, Penalties, and How to Avoid Them

Introducing the Osano Enforcement Tracker! Use this tool to stay informed about the most recent privacy enforcement actions, identify patterns and trends, and report on privacy enforcement to your organization. Demonstrate the value of data privacy to your organization and maintain awareness into regulators' enforcement priorities.

“Out of sight, out of mind”—it’s human nature. We tend to forget about things until they’re right in front of us. Data privacy enforcements are no exception. We can get complacent, until penalties are back in the news and top of mind.  

Maybe a competitor gets hit with a fine. Or a disgruntled customer leaves a bad review or, worse, files a complaint. Maybe a regulator sends you a notice of non-compliance. At the least, it’s all you think about. At worst, you’re not prepared.  

As a privacy professional, you know it’s better not to let it get to this point. Maintaining visibility into your data privacy program is important. But so is knowing what’s happening in the broader ecosystem, including the latest news in privacy enforcement. Armed with all this information, you can take action early, keep costs down, avoid penalties and bad press, and protect your customers.  

That’s why we're providing privacy professionals, privacy newbies, and the whole world access to our Privacy Enforcement Tracker—free and ungated. 

An overview of the Privacy Enforcement Tracker UI.

What Is the Privacy Enforcement Tracker? 

Our regularly updated enforcement tracker highlights and summarizes noteworthy enforcement actions in the world of data privacy. It’s not an exhaustive list, but a carefully curated one, with research and analysis from our privacy pros behind each enforcement entry. We highlight the noteworthy enforcements, why they’re noteworthy, and what it means for privacy pros. Why? A few reasons:  

Some Important Enforcements Are the Ones You Never Hear About 

The media loves to devote headlines to huge fines against big tech companies. And that’s good. But there are plenty of smaller, less bombastic enforcement actions that can have an equal impact on privacy professionals. Most of us have more in common with those companies than we do with Meta. This tracker fills the gap.  

Increasingly, Your Company Could Be at Risk for Enforcement 

Checking it regularly will explode the myth that enforcement only happens occasionally to Big Tech companies—you'll find that privacy enforcement is constant and aimed at companies of all shapes and sizes. And in fact, smaller companies are coming under scrutiny much more often than in the past. 

Facts and Figures May Not Tell the Whole Story 

Many alerts and stories give you the “what” of the enforcement action, but not the “why” or “how” behind it. We wanted to go beyond the basic details and give context to help users align enforcement actions and prevention tactics with your own company.  

You’ll find actions against specific companies and investigations into different industries in the tracker, alongside helpful information like a summary of the enforcement, key violations involved, estimated size and revenue of the violating company, and more. This overview gives you an at-a-glance sense of enforcement patterns across the globe.  

If a Tracker Is Good Enough for Us, It’s Good Enough for You 

The idea of an enforcement tracker is nothing new at Osano. We originally created this tracker to fill the same information gaps on our team. After we fine-tuned it and built it up, we realized our internal tracker was a valuable resource that could help the whole privacy community. So now, we’re sharing it with you.   

How to Use the Privacy Enforcement Tracker 

Enforcement actions identified by filtered topics.

We want to make this tracker as actionable as possible for you and your organization. To that end, we designed it to be easy for you to get the most relevant information for your organization. How? 

Filter Information in Multiple Ways 

In the tracker, you can filter according to a number of attributes, including: 

• Privacy law 

• Region of enforcement 

• Industry type 

• Employee count 

• Estimated annual revenue 

• Keywords (e.g., data minimization, dark patterns, sensitive data) 

• Level of government (e.g., state, federal, supernational) 

• Who issued the enforcement (e.g., Attorney General, Data Protection Authority) 

With these filters, you can find specific patterns and cases and identify the most relevant cases for your organization.  

Use the Information to Get Stronger 

Use the results to report on enforcement as part of your communications with your company and leadership. Gain insight from cases relevant to your business or industry to anticipate regulators’ focus and prioritize different elements of your privacy program.  

Dealing with leadership hesitant to invest in your privacy program? Show them an enforcement action aligned with your business and use case; showing how privacy can prevent penalties and bad press always makes them take notice.  

Know Where to Go from Here 

We not only give you the facts, we tag each case with solutions and related resources that could help you avoid or mitigate similar violations in the future—you’ll understand the steps you need to take to avoid a similar fate. 

Check It Regularly to Stay Informed 

We recommend that you bookmark the tracker and check back consistently. We update this resource on a regular basis. You’ll develop a sense for enforcement volume and its focus at any given time.  

Why Are We Doing This? 

Simply put, we see the same three challenges over and over:  

1. Business can be avoidant. It’s easy to pretend data privacy compliance doesn’t exist . . . until it’s too late.  
2. It’s hard to keep up! There are so many privacy regulators and laws, it’s not feasible for you to check them all regularly and still manage day-to-day priorities.  
3. Even if you are keeping up with what’s new, you may not understand it. Enforcement actions are complex and hard to navigate with or without a law degree. This is true on a case-by-case basis, but it’s even harder to assess privacy enforcement as a whole and see the larger patterns at play. 

At Osano, our mission is to make data privacy compliance as simple as possible. That’s why we make this information free and accessible to all privacy pros. And it’s why we bake current compliance best practices into our product design so compliance is almost seamless.  

The Privacy Enforcement Tracker further supports your compliance by drawing out key takeaways from enforcement actions for you, empowering you to avoid similar actions, and to better understand and communicate the importance of data privacy compliance. 

What are you waiting for? Go check it out!