[Khol]

This might seem fair to the person incurring the direct cost of the response, but is markedly unfair to the person earning minimum wage who is concerned about the handling of their personal data.

The law needs to be applicable to everyone, and imposing high costs is generally considered to do the opposite: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40727400

[tetromino_]

A person earning minimum wage may be concerned about all sorts of things, and the degree of his concern can be entirely unrelated to (1) the likelihood of the concern being legitimate, (2) the potential monetary harm to the person, (3) the cost to society of investigating and reporting on it, and (4) how fairly this cost is allocated.

It is utterly unfair to compare subsidized access to an employment tribunal (potential harm: months of undeserved unemployment, loss of home and possessions; cost of investigation: spread across the entire nation's taxpayers) to almost-free access to your GDPR privacy report (potential harm: a little bit of mental discomfort; cost of investigation: borne by one organization, potentially ruinous for a small business or solo project).

[ge0rg]

As said in other comments there is no obligation for any company to store personal information, and without such information the request can be easily dealt with by a simple form letter.

Companies storing and losing PII have a huge negative impact on the affected users, like e.g. credit card fraud or tax refund scams. This bears a huge actual cost to the victims, either because they never get back the stolen money, or because they need to invest significant time and expenses to fight for it.

A company trying to make money of my PII should better be prepared to handle it securely and to delete it upon request. Handling of GDPR requests must be calculated by them as part of the data handling expenses.

[Khol]

Consider: - A landlord holding incorrect data on rental payments. - A company holding personal financial data.

In both of these cases if the information is misused it has consequences for the individual, and (relatively) higher cost for the individual on minimum wage.

In the former, this can affect your future ability to find housing. This potentially leads to extraordinary stress.

In the latter the consequences again affect both wealthy and poor, but the person living hand to mouth faces much more serious consequences if their wages are adminstratively docked to pay for costs fraudulently registered in their name. Further, they're unlikely to be able to pay an expert to resolve this or take time out of work to do this themselves.