I’ve spent the last few days reading emails from people who are desperate to keep in touch with me, my personal inbox is overflowing with messages from companies struggling to keep me on their mailing list; funny enough I don’t recognise half of them!
Alright, that’s a slight exaggeration but some I don’t ever remember signing up for any mailings; so now is a perfect time to use the opportunity and not reply. From 25th May a new law comes into force called GDPR, it basically means if you’ve got my personal data you must look after it better than before and ask me permission to do stuff with it. One of the big changes is to ‘junk’ emails, from this week unless you have given express permission for contact, it will be illegal for a company to send marketing material to you.
So, by next weekend my inbox should be empty, I have used the opportunity to not reply to any of the emails I have received over the last month or so; hopefully this means I won’t get any more emails from that insurance company who I never actually used but 8 years ago I asked for a quote!
But as a business it gets complicated, the ICO (www.ico.org.uk) have broken down the new law into 12 easy (ish) steps – if you run any business I would have a look at it now! It has taken us a few months to get ready for GDPR, we are there now but some systems did need attention; the complicated thing for any business is ensuring data is safe but it’s more difficult to ensure we only keep data that is relevant.
Sounds easy right? Well, if you’re running a business and haven’t looked at GDPR you only have a few days in which to sort things out. Even if you use a pen and paper it still matters, if you lose those details and someone complains it’s a whole world of pain!