What does the Global Data Protection Regulation changes?

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On May 15th of this year the GDPR – standing for global data protection regulation – will get into rigor in European Union countries. The regulations take place of another established in 1995. They explain on their website that as the world becomes more data-drive the need to update those regulations grew. So here is a summary of their main changes and what Seats2meet is doing about it.

Covering more territories

As the old regulation didn’t make it clear to whom the law applied, specifically to where the entities were, this one is clear; any company making use of data of European citizens, or companies placed in Europe are affected by the regulations. It doesn’t matter if the processing of data is being made somewhere else. Even if a company is not present in Europe, but collects EU citizens data, have to appoint a representative in EU.

Penalties

The Eu is taking data protection quite seriously, and this reflects in the penalties for not obeying the regulations. The highest one can get up to 20 million euros, or 4% of annual global turnover. This penalty goes to companies that are not asking their customers consent to process their data, or that infringes the core of Privacy by Design concepts. There are several different penalties for violating each part of the regulations.

Consent

The conditions for consent changed and that’s one of the main parts of the regulations. In order for a user to give consent the privacy and data forms must be easy and simple for anyone to understand it. That means no more legal terms.

Changes at the Seats2meet website

We kept our eyes on the regulations since 2016, when EU announced them. Since then we have been studying the laws and what is it in our website that we need to change. So here are the modifications:

  • You can visualize all the data we use. Before, you could see and modify most of the data we use. There is the only thing that you couldn’t visualize, and that is who you are being matched to. Although you can see who are your matches, you couldn’t know who was see you as a match. That is different now, and you can visualize who is seeing you as a match on your profile page at Seats2meet.com.
  • We added an opt-in to our privacy policies and terms before you can create your login. They were already quite a simple and quick read, so we didn’t have to change much in there. I recommend you to read it as well, as it is the same size as this blog. You can find it at seats2meet.com/privacy.
  • We also changed the way you can subscribe to our newsletter from opt-out to opt-in. By the way, if you would like to receive the S2M stories weekly – like the one you are reading now – you can subscribe here.

You can read more about the GDPR at eugdpr.org