My (brief) thoughts on the new GDPR of 2018

Looks like we’re having a new road ahead of us; pretty much uncharted and, in some (rather vast) areas, it screams “trouble” either way. Yes, we got the idea of where we’re heading, but it’s like you are climbing the Everest for the second time, only now you have a new sherpa guide, and this time you are going up to the summit on the other side of the mountain. It’s not like you know what the heck lies ahead of you, but you can’t say this is your first climb up there.

I have learned the requirements, I know by heart the mantra of the do’s and mainly of the don’t part of it all, but I can’t stifle the nagging feeling which says “instead of doing your work, you’ll waste valuable time on second guessing yourself at every step of the way”. Probably not what the legislator had in mind, but…there you are; I am talking of the real life on Planet Earth, not of some shiny, glitzy and perfect rules to be listed and obeyed as if they were the 10 commandments in some heavenly and perfect part of this Universe…

It began sooner than expected: the first wave hit me on the 11th of May (2 weeks before GDPR became official), when an online data provider suddenly stopped releasing reports of any sort, basically closed down their office. When asked, their reply was that “we are sorry, but for us it’s better to close the business down than to continue and be fined or worse”. As for my already-existing credit with that firm…they offered me a refund. Blast that, I needed data not money back…

If this is the beginning of a new age in this respect, I already miss the days when world was a place where one had to make his/her own decisions, and nobody else on their behalf. A hard place, yes, sometime unforgiving, of course, but a place of what one made of it nevertheless. It seems to me that this new world wants me to be responsible for my actions, but fences me inside a chicken yard.

I know it is all intended for instance, to safeguard all that data which floats around unchecked over the internet (not only there, of course), and to make this world a safer and more protective place, and as a result, (at least at a theoretical level), personal data will be more secure, and the rate of spam marketing will come down. Who knows? I, for one, can only hope that this will be so.