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You couldn’t make it up (or so you’d think) …

You know you’re falling off the pace when you get bombarded for weeks (or is it months?) by emails and/or texts from seemingly every organisation you’ve ever had contact with or from – at no point during which do you understand why or what the slightest it’s got to do with you – and then eventually you ignore whatever it is they’re trying to get across to you … and simply get on with your life.

And frankly don’t care.

Because life’s too short.

Welcome to 2018 and the wonderful whacky world of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or European law regulation (EU) 2016/679 which – if you were not previously aware of it or its implications – comes into effect in the UK today!

Casting around this morning for a straightforward and simple guide to what it’s all about [and that in itself took a while googling I can tell you] here is a link for Rusters to the appropriate page of the website of an organisation apparently in favour if the new regulations’ intentions – WHICH?

Good luck to anyone who attempts to read and understand it – and I say that with sincerity and feeling since, to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered!

These past few weeks I’ve been getting tens of contacts from all sorts of organisations, e.g. presumably those I’ve ever ‘registered’ with in an effort to buy a concert ticket, read a website’s content, undertake a transaction … and/or organisations who have either picked my contact details up via ‘cookies’ or ‘bots’ [or whatever they’re called] which crawl around websites hoovering up information with the intention of providing individuals’ contact/identity information to advertising/marketing organisations … the better for them to target anyone showing the slightest interest in possibly buying anything.

Two examples that I personally have experienced randomly are/were (1) villas in Mallorca and (2) a ‘bomber jacket’ winter coat.

In both cases, having alighted on newspaper websites and then randomly for no particular reason having clicked on an advertisement in the margin for a Mallorcan villa for sale at 4.7 million euros – simply for a look-see out of idle curiosity – and then, in the second example, ditto on what appeared to be an American clothing website.

For a month or more afterwards – whenever I went to the same newspaper website – it was uncanny that, as night followed day, I was literally swamped by advertisements either for the same items that I’d originally looked at  … or indeed others of a similar nature [presumably on the basis that “You once indicated some sort of interested in THAT … so maybe, if you didn’t buy it … you’d be interested in THIS instead …”].

Of course, it goes without saying that I don’t have 4.7 million euros burning a hole in my pocket waiting to be splashed out on a villa in Mallorca, nor would I ever buy something from America on a credit card because of my acute paranoia about fraudsters ever getting hold of my personal banking details and taking me for every penny I possess.

What I have noted about the content of these contacts from all these organisations is the variety of their content.

Some simply write to tell you how important they regard internet security generally and the sanctity of any information they hold on you personally – and er … that’s it. There’s nothing offered for you to ‘click’ on, or signify that you’re happy for you to hold same within their organisations.

So those ones get deleted automatically.

Then there’s a different type, one in which it says ‘click here in order to remain in contact with us’, or something of similar nature.

Those I also delete automatically, simply because – from my viewpoint – at least 80% of the wares of websites (e.g. ‘So-and-so Golfing Holidays’) that contact me I have either never had any interest in – or maybe once used to have, but no longer.

My ‘bucket chemistry’ approach to such things is coloured by my presumption that – if the course of my campaign to decimate the amount of junk and tat coming my way – approximately 20% of things that are in fact vital to my continued existence also get consigned to the proverbial rubbish bin … then, frankly, I can live with that.

POSTSCRIPT

I recently had reason to book holiday flights for later this summer.

Chatting to the MD of my local travel shop about 250 yards from my abode, with whom I have regularly dealt these past 15 years, he apologised for the fact he was shortly going to have to send me a request for permission to hold a certain amount of personal information on me.

I replied that I was perfectly happy for him to hold whatever he had.

Most particularly because, if I should ever lose my passport (and I recently had it stolen) or forget my personal information – I know just where to come in order to retrieve it!

I then asked how his ‘compliance’ with this GDPR thing was going.

It was a nightmare, he replied. He had recently attended a conference conducted by a supposed ‘expert’ up on the new regulation and had emerged not much wiser and somewhat confused.

The fines for non-compliance were potentially astronomical and yet, about 40% of the queries or requests for clarification that came from the floor, including his own, had been left unanswered – with on occasions the ‘expert’ admitting that she hadn’t a clue as to what the answer was.

Furthermore, he’d recently had a run-in with a rogue – what we in the legal trade would call a ‘vexatious’ – customer who booked a holiday in Abu Dhabi and then had begun complaining about it almost before he touched down there.

Said chap was now issuing ‘letters before action’ and claiming compensation for all sorts of things that (the travel agent could prove because he’d kept his email correspondence) had never happened or were never said.

However, under the GDPR regulations, any customer – including the complainer referred to – could demand that said travel agent delete all information relating to him (including all email correspondence) and the agent would have to comply.

Thereby being obliged to delete the very evidence that would conclusively prove that said complaining prat – or any similar that might come along in the future – was totally making up his allegations from thin air and with no just cause!

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About Gerald Ingolby

Formerly a consumer journalist on radio and television, in 2002 Gerald published a thriller novel featuring a campaigning editor who was wrongly accused and jailed for fraud. He now runs a website devoted to consumer news. More Posts