I don’t think many people have been thinking much about how much is going to change in a couple of weeks.
“Sunrise day” for the GDPR is 25 May. That’s when the EU can start smacking fines on violators.
Simply put, your site or service is a violator if it extracts or processes personal data without personal permission. Real permission, that is. You know, where you specifically say “Hell yeah, I wanna be tracked everywhere.”
To give you an idea, I don’t sell anything nor have any ads running on my websites, but I’m having to rethink having an email subscription list, and writing a privacy policy that lays out exactly what I do use cookies for. (Page visit stats mostly). What are websites that do sell things, and advertise going to have to do?
Advertisers are going to find it difficult to actually show that people gave them explicit permission to track them, or to start emailing them.
I kind of wish I was in the EU so I could file a complaint against every company that added my email address to their list without verifying that the person who registered using it was actually me. (Many times, it wasn’t) But, the reality is that those companies should be doing this, and more, if there’s even the possibility that one of them is in the EU.
There’s no way adtech, as Doc describes it, survives if it truly plays by the rules and asks specific permission. What comes next?
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