GDPR 25th May 2018 What are you doing about it?

[pw66]

I do it tomorrow, tomorrows another day.
What is giving me the raving hump is all the spam emails from every firm in the industry desperately trying to get me to sign up to their marketing emails before the 26th. I have missed a couple of customer enquiries due to 'inbox overload'.

[Justin]

We've been inundated as well, hopefully this was a good opportunity to get off some of the non opted in mailing lists.

I'll need to send something out for the forum as well. We don't tend to bombard members with emails but obviously we have to keep certain basic data so I'll 'ask' for permission'

[webtrekker]

We've been inundated as well, hopefully this was a good opportunity to get off some of the non opted in mailing lists.

I'll need to send something out for the forum as well. We don't tend to bombard members with emails but obviously we have to keep certain basic data so I'll 'ask' for permission'

Interesting, I'd never considered that Justin. Of course, you will be storing, at the minimum, IP and email addresses, so I suppose that comes under the remit of GDPR.

[Drew]

There was a section on BBC 5Live this morning about GDPR. They brought in an expert to answer questions from callers who were in business, ran groups and organisations etc. The expert was very down to earth, and very concise. It can be heard here, and its an hour long:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b39r8x#play

The expert was on earlier in the show, and was asked 'do I need to immediately send out one of those please resub emails?'. Her answer (paraphrased) was No, if you do, you'll be in with all the other companies doing the same things. Give it a few weeks, and you'll get a much better read / clickthrough rate. The IPO have said for the first year they won't look to prosecute for breaches, just educate. So don't panic, just do it as and when.

One of the things I took from it, was that if people can reasonably expect to hear from you, then no need to anything, other than update privacy policy. The example used was an Allotment association, but same would apply to forums, groups, subscription customers etc. As a member, you can reasonably expect to hear from 'the management' from time to time. As long as the receiver has an option to opt out, you're fine.

[Justin]

Excellent, thank you for that Drew. They're talking about it on Radio 2 now.

[5H17]

How's everyone getting on with this? Some very useful info from Mrs. Maggot there, thank you Laura.

A lot of folk seem to be struggling with how far they they need to go with this as a small company, one man band etc.

Tearing my hair out, to be honest (and I shaved my head for charridy on Saturday, so there wasn't much of it to start with!)

As per usual I've left this till the last minute, but what I cannot find any clarification on is what I need to do with previous subscribers to our marketing. By default that was set to 'customer accepts marketing', and I changed it a few weeks ago so they now have to opt in. That's fine... I get that. What I don't understand is what I now have to do with the other people on the list that have not 'opted in'. Do I need to mass email them (yet another email for them to delete and ignore) or can I continue to have them on the list?

I'm puzzled....

[Earl Smith]

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/b ... eps_en.pdf

This might help or muddy the waters even more.