I’ve been getting “GDPR …”, “confirm you want …” and “Updating our privacy policy” Emails for weeks in a swelling tide and I’ve been amused to see them slowly getting, in my not so humble, barrack room lawyer opinion, on average more and more well judged about what GDPR really requires. I do now wonder whether the organisations that are still asking us to confirm that we want to receive things are tacitly admitting that they don’t know if all the Email addresses they hold were obtained with full consent, or if some know damn well that not all of them were.
It’s been a good opportunity to cancel quite a lot of them. Sometimes that’s had a tinge of sadness when my unsubscribing has been because the Emails were from London galleries and I have to face up to the fact that most of the things they are telling me they’re showing will come and go while I’m up in my mountain eyrie. Still, it’s been good to purge most of them.
Finally though, I had to face up to whether the data I have here is GPDR compliant and, as I’m sure I don’t have personal information on anyone, other than some IP addresses that get collected in the hit logging, I didn’t think that would take much but of course it meant putting up a privacy policy, putting that in the top menu of the site. Then I realised that I didn’t have a “contact me” form so I added that too, and, in the end it has taken a while. Still, as I was doing the necessarily rather more complicated GPDR compliance work for CORE, some of it was pretty familiar and easy.
I guess I’m putting this here just to make anyone who follows this blog enough to have left comments or signed up for alerts pretty well 100% certain to have been given a pointer to the small print. However, to illustrate things, I am adding a gull.
Now if you want, you can pull that jpeg file down, get the GPS data and work out exactly where s/he lives (if the sign in the background didn’t give it away anyway). Do gulls have personal data protection rights?
And that brings me to link to a blog post that Emily, PhD student and much valued colleague in Roehampton has put up about GDPR. She has caught the anxiety she and so many researchers have been through over GDPR and how it impinged research data collection. She’s also brought her usual gentle wit to things, much better than my feeble gulling!