Posted: Friday, 24 May 2019 @ 16:19
So 25th May has been and gone, with much anticipation and many headless chickens. Thank heavens for the well timed Bank Holiday weekend that allowed us all the breathing space to recover… and sift through our emails.
On the plus side, our inboxes have made us feel disproportionately popular over the last week, and we can also see just how many organisations have accumulated our details, both personally and professionally, over 15 years of online purchasing and communications.
Peculiarly, we haven’t had any communications from those organisations that have the most personal data on us – HMRC, the NHS and so forth, but then again, they are probably exempt as they are so very, very careful about data and the like.
Nonetheless, what is there to learn from this exercise?
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No doubt we would have done it anyway at some point, even if we had not been in the EU, so as to be appropriately aligned with International policies.
- It has given a lot of people a good excuse to wander about with cups of coffee, looking important before rushing off to another meeting, focus group, task force update - ‘insert latest moniker here’.
- It was so important that even Ken Bruce mentioned it on Radio 2 just before PopMaster.
- The airports were full of advisors, consultants and other professionals jetting off on well-deserved upgraded breaks courtesy of extra fee income, but even their data protection expertise could not save them from the lack of aviation fuel should they be flying from Stansted, or gridlocked traffic should they have opted for a staycation in Padstow.
- There are multiple ways of doing unmentionable things to the outer covering of felines and also at least as many different ways to interpret EU Directives.
To conclude, are we better off for having GDPR in place? Probably, but truth be told, however many rules there are in place, one principle always rings true - responsible members of the business community will have made efforts to be responsible, while rogues will invariably continue to be rogues.
Everyone does business differently, but we have always considered integrity at the heart of business is amongst the greatest of assets… even if we do feel Instapopular all of a sudden.