Unlikely, in the EU, because who the hell is going to consent to that in line with GDPR?

I think it’d be a lot of (evil) fun to form a crowdfunded entity with the sole purpose of suing companies that egregiously violate privacy norms. Given the level of support for the GDPR in many quarters, I think funding goals can be easily reached. Some lawyers might also want to jump on the bandwagon and make themselves a name (and profit).

> I think it’d be a lot of (evil) fun to form a crowdfunded entity with the sole purpose of suing companies that egregiously violate privacy norms.

Enforcement is one dedicated organization per country. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... for the possible sanctions such an organization could apply. It can be pretty minor.

There's a proposed EU law which is pretty much terrible. GPDR is great (IMO).

How does it work - can people actually report violations to this enforcement agency? How hard/likely is it for a company to simply buy their way into these agencies?

> How does it work - can people actually report violations to this enforcement agency? How hard/likely is it for a company to simply buy their way into these agencies?

I can't speak for all of Europe, but in Northern Europe this would be very unlikely to happen. The governments and agencies aren't flawless here either, but at least they are quite honest and uncorrupted.

In European Union legal systems does not have extensive compensation for damages like in US. Instead of class action lawsuits the government (consumer agencies) represents non-corporate interest.

So what means exist for consumers to seek redressal in the event of wrong doing by a corporation? Or should they just write to the relevant agency and hope that it picks it up?

I know that the EU competition commission does some solid work, but judging by some of the laws passed (I mean the recent internet copyright law, and the past anti-piracy laws), it’d seem the news and media companies have got the agencies deep in their pockets.

Pretty much everybody who just clicks "I accept" by reflex.

So... pretty much everybody.

As a sidenote, I aboslutely hate it when they make you dial all the digits of your credit card and then when you reach a human being, you have to tell them the digits again.

Alas,the fault is with our profession. The risk is too great to assume the ACD properly routed the (effectively) out-of-band account details in lockstep with the voice traffic.