I guess it has been years in the making. The new General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union. It is a law on data protection for the privacy of all individuals in the EU.
Here is a small summary of what the general data protection rights should encompass
The GDPR provides the following rights for individuals:
- The right to be informed
- The right of access
- The right to rectification
- The right to erasure
- The right to restrict processing
- The right to data portability
- The right to object
- Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling.
This actually should be good news to everyone who uses the internet. Depending on your relationship with various web sites this could be meaningful. Of course this is more important if the site(s) have any information about you or your habits. This blog, well as of today anyway, doesn’t collect any information and the cookies that are used are only the basic functionality provided by WordPress.
It was because of the passage of this law (went into effect June 1st) that caused a lot of email boxes to start receiving mails from sites asking for confirmation of your relationship. I supposed that without that affirmation a lot of information was sent to the bit bucket in the sky.
Not only emails but now a lot of web sites now inform you that they are using cookies. This is nice, I guess, but when every site starts doing that at the exact same time it probably causes a lot of people to be conditioned to “press ok”.
