Ephera , 7 months ago

I have no hard data, but from being in the industry + reading the news, my impression has been that the number of known data breaches went up significantly, even for US companies. Is the punishment maybe just completely laughable in those US laws?

That was the case here in Germany. The GDPR is heavily inspired by our data protection law (BDSG), that we had in place since the 90s. With a significant amendment, which is that punishment went up from at most 300,000€ to 20 billion € (and even more for big companies).
For many companies, this was when they realized, they actually have to adhere to data protection laws. Suddenly, we had non-IT companies reporting data breaches, which was essentially not a thing beforehand.