GDPR - May 2018

If you don't know what the General Data Protection Regulation is right now, you soon will. The EU Data Protection Directive has been around since 1995 but it is only a directive and not a regulation**. The bit that I can see see causing issues is the "right to be forgotten". So if you have data on social media I am guessing those companies will have to just delete you if that is what you want. It kicks in from May this year but as it is an EU directive I reckon a lot of companies will think they can just ignore it with "Brexit" kicking in but if you want to have any dealings with Europe, probably worth following it.

**Regulations have binding legal force throughout every Member State and enter into force on a set date in all the Member States. Directives lay down certain results that must be achieved but each Member State is free to decide how to transpose directives into national laws.

https://www.eugdpr.org/eugdpr.org.html

This from the Wikipedia page for the "Right to be forgotten"

"In 1995, the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46/EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as "media" companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a "media" company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a "data controller" under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These "data controllers" are required under EU law to remove data that is "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant", making this directive of global importance.[7]"