Are You Sick of GDPR Yet?

The answer is probably yes, you are sick of GDPR – whether you have your own business, and have to deal with the responsibility of daring to have people’s contact details (and, heaven forfend, use those details to contact them with); or if you have spent the last couple of weeks picking through a deluge of emails from businesses you don’t really want to hear from, ignoring the ones you don’t care about, and clicking “Yes” on the ones you really want to keep hearing from.

From the latter point of view, it’s been quite carthatic – I have been delighted to see businesses weeding themselves from my inbox, saving me hours of effort to do the same myself, should I be so inclined. It’s quite nice to feel that the ball is back in my court, and the power to be contacted is back in my hands. If I’ve missed anyone, I’m sure I will discover it pretty quickly, and get in touch of my own accord to provide my consent once again.

And it’s certainly made companies get creative with their begging emails. I’ve seen song lyric emails “Please Don’t Go”, “Baby Come Back”; apologetic and “sorry-to-bother-you” emails; impending doom emails (This Is Your Last Chance…); but the very best and most creative one came from Lapland UK, who told me that Father Christmas was taking me off the Good List.

From the former point of view, I am sure that GDPR is nothing but a headache. A small business owning friend (Emily, from the fabulous Bundlebean) recently posted a status reading simply “GDP aaaargh!!”, so I can tell it’s not been a pleasure. The whole thing was designed to target giants of industry, but all businesses great and small have been caught up in the net. It’s taken a lot of precious business time to learn about it, interpret what it means for your own business, and then put all the things in place to be compliant – and then, to contact anyone whose express consent you don’t currently have to email them (I’ve written a couple for clients), to ask them if it’s OK to keep emailing them – and THEN to sort through all of the responses, if you don’t have a nice automated system to do it for you, and update all your mailing lists. Nightmare. When do you get to run your business?

Anyway – aside from planning for all future software solutions and / or websites that need to gather personal data in any form – in theory, the bulk of the pain should be over with today, the day for Compliance; but if anyone out there is still wondering what they need to do about it, I have found a rather useful little checklist here: https://www.fsb.org.uk/first-voice/a-small-business-checklist-for-gdpr