Friday, May 25, 2018

GDPR & the Covering of the Ass

This is probably me being paranoid, but hey! Just a quick post & then I don't even have to worry about it anymore.

As you probably know because you use the internet, the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation law goes into effect today. (You've probably noticed a weirdly large number of "We're updating our privacy policy!" emails from various online organizations where you have accounts.) Basically it says that if you collect & do stuff with the personal data of EU citizens, you have to tell them, or else pay massive fines. This probably doesn't effect me but hey, there's some EU traffic up in here, so let's just do the due diligence & be done with it.

Do I collect personal data on this site? Aside from not accepting anonymous comments so there is *some* kind of info you have to enter for that, I'll just copy & paste what John Scalzi said because he said it so well:

"I personally am not (and never have) collecting any information about anyone, other in the very general sense of reading and comprehending whatever bits of personal information people leave in their comments. That said, I don’t do anything commercial with any of that — I don’t mine my comment threads for personal data, and certainly don’t comb through them for commercial purposes. It’s not that kind of site, and I’m really not that interested. Doing any of that requires work and effort that I have no desire to do."

All I really want to do is ramble into the void and occasionally ramble back and forth with other weirdos who are as running-preoccupied as I am. I have no interest in monetizing this blog, its visitors, or whatever data trail they happen to leave. I don’t even use sales affiliate links (and if that ever changes, I'll be transparent about it). So rest easy.

Does Blogger collect personal data on this site? Almost certainly. Ie, if you comment, you probably get a cookie left in your browser to make things more efficient for you in the future. Like every other online entity, I am certain Blogger is doing whatever it is they have to do in order to comply with the GDPR. I'm pretty sure there's nothing else I need to do about that but if I learn that there is, I will certainly do it.

So, long story short, another Scalzi quote: "Basically, we’ll just keep on doing what we’re already doing here. If any of that changes in any significant way, I will let you know."

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