In case you’ve been living in a cave, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force on Friday last week. This is Europe’s latest crack at regulating consumer privacy in the digital era, and it’s definitely a very pro-consumer regulation. It’s going to have some big impacts on the business models of a bunch of businesses.
Part of the regulation requires that EU consumers give informed consent to personal data collection and use so companies around the world have been scrambling to update their privacy policies. For people whose data is already collected, they’re sending out emails desperately trying to get permission to continue doing whatever it is they were doing.
Last week I decided I was getting enough of these emails that it’d be interesting to chart how many of them I’d received. As you can see there was a flurry of emails just before the deadline, and quite a large amount of them that completely missed the deadline. The last one so far came from Blockchain on Sunday morning Sydney time.
There are some caveats here. When these emails first started turning up, I was mostly just binning them. So any received more than 30 days before I changed the way I dealt with them are probably gone. Similarly a bunch ended up in the spam folder so older ones would have been deleted.
