Annual Report 2021 out now!

21 July 2022
2021 annual report

Annual Report 2021 out now!

2021 marks noyb’s fourth year of fighting for the right to privacy. We have taken things up a notch by filing a record-breaking amount of complaints: noyb filed over 400 half-automated GDPR complaints on deceptive cookie banners. Hundreds of major websites have switched to a more reasonable cookie banner in the course of this project. Towards the end of the year, we started to see decisions resulting from our 101 complaints on EU-US data transfers based on the Court of Justice decision in “Schrems II”. In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian and French Data Protection Authority decided that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. Furthermore, we worked on many other projects, such as worker’s rights, or collective redress, or a new automatic browser signal that serves as a consent management system.

2021 was not only the fourth year of our organization but also the second year of a global pandemic. We are even more thankful to all our supporters, members, sponsors and funders, who made it possible for this organization to get through another difficult year and be financially stable. 

We are happy that the broad support in 2021 also gave us the opportunity of expanding our team: we were able to grow by two new team members and by the end of 2021, our multidisciplinary team of 18 people from 12 countries was engaged in bringing forward privacy cases, developing software for our legal tech initiatives, communicating with media and members and making sure the office is up and running. We filed more than 470 complaints in 2021 and were handling several cases in courts. Substantial fines have been imposed based on our complaints, notably a 6.3 million Euro fine for the gay dating app Grindr. Our work was covered in more than 575 newspaper articles, we gave numerous interviews for newspapers, television and radio stations and participated in seminars and events all over Europe. 

 Read all about our new and ongoing projects, financials and plans for 2022 in noyb’s Annual Report 2021!