Security News > 2024 > February > Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Europe's General Data Protection Regulation 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.

The consequence of Europe's privacy regime, according to the researchers, is that "EU firms decreased data storage by 26 percent and data processing by 15 percent relative to comparable US firms, becoming less 'data-intensive.'".

To comply with GDPR, EU firms have had to adopt measures that are the equivalent of a 20 percent increase on average in the cost of data.

GDPR and associated compliance measures have also increased the cost to produce information - though not to the same degree as data storage or computation costs.

"This is primarily because data is significantly cheaper than computation and therefore accounts for only a small share of the information cost."

The authors stop short of determining whether the privacy provided by GDPR is worth the cost.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/gdpr_data_processing_costs/