Happy GDPR Day!

[Labster]

I'm sure lots of you are celebrating by reading all of the emails in your inbox with titles like "We changed our privacy policy".  Or you're getting emails like "we're going to assume you continue to give consent to use your email" which are, lol, not going to help with GDPR compliance.  Personally, I'm celebrating by rushing to implement new privacy features, and attempting to educate my project managers about the scope of the law.  I expect to continue to celebrate through the whole "holiday weekend".

Hope you enjoy the updates to the Privacy Policy I wrote for Miraheze!

[robkelk]

I actually got one - count it, one - email that did it correctly. They asked whether I wanted to continue receiving emails from them. (I said yes.)

I also put a sitenotice on the freebie wiki, in bold text, pointing out that this changes the terms of service so please go read the policy.

[Dartz]

I know more about it than I let on, and less about it than I should.

All that I really care about however, is that it's the thing that really fucked up my workweek. I imagine it's the same for a lot of people.

I am not a web developer.

[LynnInDenver]

My husband's been doing meetings and other *BLEEP* for the past four weeks regarding GDPR, as he works customer back end support (checking into credit card payments and why things haven't shipped from vendors) at a major electronics components distributor here that has a major international presence. Dartz, he would agree wholeheartedly with your assessment, as applied to his past work month.

[Labster]

I've read the entire law, and I live in the United States.  It's got 99 articles, but a bait-and-switch ain't one.

As an example of how not to do a privacy email, we have Ghostery, which put its entire email list into the To field.  Oops.  Hope they enjoy their giant fine.  If anyone's using their software, I'd suggest switching to uBlock Origin (with optional social tracking blocker list on) and/or Privacy Badger.  Be sure to cancel your account with Ghostery!

If anyone is in Europe and feels like they truly hate a company, feel free to send this Nightmare Letter and watch them squirm!

[LynnInDenver]

I saw somewhere that Facebook was basically hiding about 300+ buttons a couple of clicks deep for the individual companies that advertise with them. No single click option to opt out of all of them. I'm suspecting that they're going to not only NOT comply with the intended spirit of the law, but fully intend to see how far they can go in not complying with the actual letter of the law through specific interpretations of the language of it, and I'm damned sure they'll do what is needed to segment their system to make sure no countries outside the EU even get to see the privacy enhancements they are forced to install.

BTW, would I be correct in assuming that the literal best way to comply with GDPR (and I know it's not a bait and switch, it's "here's what will happen if you get clumsy with customer data that should remain private, and here's what we will define as private for the sake of the argument", which the world needs badly) is to minimize data collected and retained to the absolute bare minimum needed to provide service to the person who the data originates from, as well as never selling what little is collected? Read: An impossible standard for most social platforms to actually meet, since their whole business model is predicated on gathering as much data as automatically possible on you to sell on to the highest bidder. The current business models of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr, et al, just got a lot less certain, all it would take is one breach, much less a bad one, and there goes any chance of a profitable year for the one caught with their pants down.