thanks, Europe

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This is the message that greeted me this morning. Because of Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the way in which data are shared is now forced to be much more transparent. On one level, this is a very good thing because it obliges companies to be up-front about what they do with your personal data, as well as to offer the user the option of accepting or rejecting data collection by the company. On another level, though, this could present new inconveniences for the user. The regulation went into effect on May 25, and this site has some useful information on what the new regulation means. Here's a quick excerpt:

Much of the GDPR builds on rules set by earlier EU privacy measures like the Privacy Shield and Data Protection Directive, but it expands on those measures in two crucial ways. First, the GDPR sets a higher bar for obtaining personal data than we’ve ever seen on the internet before. By default, any time a company collects personal data on an EU citizen, it will need explicit and informed consent from that person. Users also need a way to revoke that consent, and they can request all the data a company has from them as a way to verify that consent. It’s a lot stronger than existing requirements, and it explicitly extends to companies based outside the EU. For an industry that’s used to collecting and sharing data with little to no restriction, that means rewriting the rules of how ads are targeted online.

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