You have probably noticed a flood of emails and alerts from companies in the past few weeks informing you about changes to their privacy policies.
Don’t ignore them.
Yes, there is a lot of legalese to wade through. But resist the temptation to immediately delete those emails or close the alerts right away. They may contain important information about managing your digital privacy at a time when it’s become clear that our online data is far from safe.
All those privacy messages are appearing now because a law called the General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect across the European Union on Friday. The law has been heralded as the world’s strongest protector of digital privacy rights. And while it was designed for Europeans, the borderless nature of the online world has virtually every commercial entity that touches the web making changes to its sites and apps to comply.
The data regulation law centers on two main principles. The first is that companies need your consent to collect your data. The second is that you should be required to share only data that is necessary to make their services work.
Danny O’Brien, a director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered this analogy: “A birthday cake company needs your name to put on the birthday cake. If it isn’t essential information, you can deny them consent to use that data and you still have to get the service.”
If companies don’t comply with the new rules, they can be fined up to 4 percent of their global revenue. But you should expect businesses that rely on advertising revenue to work hard to persuade as many of us as possible to give our consent for them to collect as much data as possible. Companies can do that by making it easy for people to give permission, and immensely complicated to opt out.
So to ensure you benefit from the new law, it helps to examine the revamped privacy policies we are all getting. Here is what to look for.
Don’t ignore them.
Yes, there is a lot of legalese to wade through. But resist the temptation to immediately delete those emails or close the alerts right away. They may contain important information about managing your digital privacy at a time when it’s become clear that our online data is far from safe.
All those privacy messages are appearing now because a law called the General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect across the European Union on Friday. The law has been heralded as the world’s strongest protector of digital privacy rights. And while it was designed for Europeans, the borderless nature of the online world has virtually every commercial entity that touches the web making changes to its sites and apps to comply.The data regulation law centers on two main principles. The first is that companies need your consent to collect your data. The second is that you should be required to share only data that is necessary to make their services work.
Danny O’Brien, a director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered this analogy: “A birthday cake company needs your name to put on the birthday cake. If it isn’t essential information, you can deny them consent to use that data and you still have to get the service.”
If companies don’t comply with the new rules, they can be fined up to 4 percent of their global revenue. But you should expect businesses that rely on advertising revenue to work hard to persuade as many of us as possible to give our consent for them to collect as much data as possible. Companies can do that by making it easy for people to give permission, and immensely complicated to opt out.
So to ensure you benefit from the new law, it helps to examine the revamped privacy policies we are all getting. Here is what to look for.
by Brian X. Chen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Minh Uong/The New York Times
