Data Protection: the GDPR and me. And, by extension, you.
The EU’s a funny old institution, but despite everything, its heart’s in the right place. Its brains are sometimes on massive overkill, though given all the recent hooo-hah over Facebook allowing dubious political analysts unfettered access to the data it keeps on all of us, maybe the EU’s latest big regulation–the General Data Protection Regulation–isn’t all that bad an idea.
In short, the GDPR is there to protect the millions of bits of data that countless organisations keep on EU citizens. And it puts the onus on little people like me, as well as humongous global entities like Google and Amazon, to be clear about how I’m meeting the requirement to protect your rights over how I collect and use the information you give me when visiting this website or signing up to my newsletter.
So, here’s a link to my privacy statement, which attempts to do just that. It applies to everyone who visits the website or gets my occasional emailed newsletter. The GDPR comes into force on 25 May, but this statement is live now if you want to take advantage of it.
And on other matters, I’ve been having fun doing some author swag for the conventions I’m going to this year. I never thought when I decided that I’d like to be a writer that I’d spend an entire day not-gluing magnets onto the back of rainbow roses. 150 of them.
Still, they’re very pretty, and if you’re going to the UK Meet in September, one of them will be yours. Only remember to keep it away from your laptop and phone on the way home, otherwise you won’t have to worry about protecting any data you’re carrying. You’ll have wiped it clean.
Are you re-permissioning your list too?
Man, I hate this thing.
I did that a couple of days ago, inviting people to adjust their preferences – I’d added in a GDPR compliant field for them to complete. Of course, most of the people I was sending to had only given me their email to get Gyrfalcon from Instafreebie and they were never real readers – let’s just say the open rate on the newsletters **plummeted** after they all joined up – and so my newsletter audience is going to be at about 20 -25% of what it was last week, but at least these are people who open the darn email.