European Data Protection Regulation

[Richard]

Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has resulted in a few email requests from companies I like, seeking permission to continue as before and that is all well and good.
However, I am also receiving lots of stuff from unknown sources - unsolicited email.
GDPR seems to be making things worse and not better if I have to cope with a deluge of spurious emails as a result of GDPR.
How difficult would it be for Google or Yahoo mail to deny access to my email unless I had first explicitly approved a request to send emails to my account?
There must be a way of filtering by prior approval or else things may get just out of hand?

[Geoff]

GDPR has been a time consuming nightmare, trying to get my web customers ready (the ones who can be bothered anyway).

It's so hard to give advice as every situation is different with how, where and what data they are storing/collecting. Plus of course whatever advice I give always has to be followed by "this is not strictly legal advice" so there's no comeback further down the line. Unfortunately I am not a lawyer, though the wages would be good.

The interview with the so called expert on the Jeremy Vine show gave worryingly wrong advice in my opinion and looking at some of the emails coming through from the big companies I don't think they are 100% understanding it either.

You've got to love Brussells for this one. Ugh!

[seahermit]

A friend has received a letter (he doesn't use email) from N-Power asking him to agree to his data being shared with a variety of other concerns. It says that, if he doesn't reply, the assumption will be that he agrees.

As far as I know from the media, this is illegal. If someone does not respond and specifically confirm their agreement to data sharing, that has to be taken as a "no", the same as if they said "no" anyway. It may well be more complicated than I am seeing, even so I think N-power's attitude is outrageous and I have told my friend to call them and be very rude.

N-power are anyway complete idiots! My friend was being charged for gas units - based on readings taken from an ELECTRICITY meter. It took him eleven months to stop the enormous bills and red letters coming. You could not make it up ..

[seahermit]

I myself received a very long email about data-sharing from Facebook the other day - the list of sections, subsections and so on which I was supposed to read through and "tick off" was so extremely long that I am afraid I just chickened out and ignored the whole thing. I don't have time at present to spend a whole hour grappling with such a complex questionnaire and trying to understand it.

[Richard]

I can't see any imaginable authority on earth ever swooping down on all the small businesses (let alone the mega-big ones) and fining them massively for not having every item of this new GDPR directive in compliance.
At the most wait and see if a warning is issued, that is if indeed anyone can look into all the non-compliance issues, which seem nigh-on impossible to police anyway.
What is the worst that can happen - get a warning and then comply with it!
Who is going to pay the body set up to monitor everyone?

[Geoff]

My thoughts is there will definitely be some scalps, large and small. The likes of Honda and Morrisons have both been fined in the past for sending out email marketing to non-subscribed addresses, and that's before GDPR was ever conceived. I think you know who pays for the body set up to police this. We all do.

[Richard]

Hi Geoff,

I stand corrected, there is a body which exists already and was fining people even before the GDPR came into force:

https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/

Almost ironical to see that The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was fined £325,000 by the ICO after losing unencrypted DVDs containing recordings of police interviews.

[Richard]

I remember hearing about careless incidents where government ministers lost a DVD of vital data on a train or bus and the consequences may have been enormous if information fell into the wrong hands.
Or it may have been paper-typed reports that were lost, either way it is all about data-protection.
I can't see how a hairdresser salon has too much to worry about if its records of customers fall into the 'wrong hands' - what's the worst that can happen seems to be the main point of it all.
So why punish the small business for not seeking permissions to send emails? That seems to be at the bottom of the pile in order of relevance.

'Big Brother is watching you' was the famous quote from an Orwellian novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is a dystopian novel published in 1949, by English author George Orwell. The novel is set in the year 1984, when most of the world's population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.
Is technology now indeed watching us or are we in control of of what we are doing?
With the likes of Facebook and others able to encourage terrorists or child-molesters to 'find friends' it seems that data protection is not the only problem that we have to deal with.
1984 (the novel) shows Technology playing a significant part in the detection of thoughtcrime with the ubiquitous telescreens which could inform the government and misinform and monitor the population.