GDPR, Cookies, Data, Consent and You
Okay so the European Union are doing a thing called GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. It comes into effect on the 25th of May. It’s a complicated mess of things that literally everyone has to do, whether you’re working in the EU or not. Very basically, the GDPR aims to protect the data of users, allowing you as a user to demand that any data any company (that exists, works or operates within the EU at least) has on you can be updated or removed as you please, that data HAS to be kept secure and safe, and in the case of any breaches, the company must inform you and protect your data.
What does this mean for the Daily SPUF? Frankly I have no idea. I’ve been reading into this stuff since March and I STILL have no idea what I really should be doing. I don’t even know if this really affects us. But I’m going to talk through all this stuff anyway.
Okay, firstly, I’ll tell you about data the Daily SPUF collects. Or rather, Jetpack and Google Analytics collect. We at the Daily SPUF have no hand in the anonymous user information that’s collected by them. It’s only there to provide numbers of views and how many times articles have been read. We don’t use it for anything else. They have their own privacy policies, which can be found here for Google and here for Jetpack.
The Google privacy policy also covers the privacy policy for Youtube, which covers our Youtube Channel, the SPUF of Legend. Again, we don’t really collect any information from that, we just occasionally glance at the number of views for our videos. The same also applies to our Twitter and Facebook pages, but honestly we don’t track anything at all from them anyway, we just have a look to see if anyone has messaged us.
The only other information we have is information supplied to us by you. This comes in two flavours.
Firstly, there’s email addresses, that are used to send out newsletters informing you of our daily article. This is a wholly automatic process. You put your email in, you confirm that you want to get emails from us, and the Daily SPUF automatically sends you a link to new articles as they are published. If you want to unsubscribe from this service, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email sent to you.
Secondly, there’s account information. To be able to write or comment on the Daily SPUF, you need to supply information to make an account function: a username and an email address, with a randomly generated password being emailed to you. Without this, you can’t actually have an account at the Daily SPUF. If you’re not happy with having an account with us and want to delete or deactivate your account, you’ll want to visit our About page and send us a message. Please note though, if you’ve had articles published, they won’t be removed, but instead will be accredited to a blank account, with any identifiable information removed.
We do our very best to protect your privacy, and aside from what Jetpack and Google anonymously use, we do NOT ever give your information out to third parties. Because that’s wrong.
Finally, we come to safety. I’ve done everything I can to make sure that the Daily SPUF is safe and secure, but I can’t guarantee 100% safety. In the unlikely scenario that something DOES happen and there’s a breach in some way, you will all be informed and we will do our best to protect your data.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty stuff, check out our Terms, Conditions and Privacy Policy stuff here.
I think that’s everything, right?
I hope so.
Please don’t fine me, mister EU.