It's been a year since the European UnionÍs General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented on May 25, 2018.

Touted as one of the strictest privacy laws to date, has the GDPR succeeded in meeting its agenda? Are businesses meeting the compliance requirements for data collection and processing? How strict have Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) been with enforcing the regulation? What impact has the GDPR had on individuals and businesses alike?

Let's take a look at how the GDPR has fared in the past year.

• Pay the price

  On January 21, 2019, Google was awarded the highest GDPR fine to date: ó50 million (USD 56.8 million). Country: France

• The watchful eye

  An entrepreneur was fined ó5,280 (nearly USD 6,000) for unlawful video surveillance of a public sidewalk. Country: Austria

• Rewarded good deeds

  A social media provider was fined for failing to secure usersÍ personal data, but the fine was reduced to ó20,000 because the company proactively informed the authorities in time. Country: Germany

COMPLAINTS

• - 144,000+ GDPR complaints have been filed to date.
• - 1 GDPR complaint filed every 4 minutes.
• - Ireland had roughly 57 complaints per 100,000 people, while in Poland, for every 100,000 people, 15 complaints were filed.

Data breach notifications

• - 89,000+ data breaches reported to date.
• - One data breach was reported every 6 minutes.
• - In Germany, an average of 45 data breaches were reported every day.
• - In the Netherlands, for every 100,000 people, an average of 89.8 data breaches were reported.
• - The lowest number of breaches reported was in Liechtenstein with 15 reported breaches.