Thank goodness it's almost over!

Yes - the General Data Protection Regulations finally come into force today which means that my inbox will no longer be engulfed by a multitude of emails threatening that if I don't 'opt in', I'll be eliminated from the sender's database forever. Bearing in mind that I'm a journalist and thus rely on being on people's databases, the threat of not responding to these emails is a real one. I've had, literally, hundreds of them over recent weeks (and a real flurry today!) and the time and effort it's taken to deal with them is ridiculous.

The good ones (sadly not enough of them) tell me to ignore them if I want to stay subscribed; the bad ones force me to fill out my details all over again. To see which category they fall into, I need to read them right the way through, anyway. As you can imagine, I'm thoroughly fed up! A number of very worried public relations professionals I know, confessed that they wished they'd thought a bit longer over how they were going to handle the regulations.

Many of them sent out emails to their entire databases asking people to opt-in if they wanted to continue receiving their releases. Even this week, many had only received a handful of responses, as opposed to the dozens they were expecting- and because they've asked the question, they need to abide by the answers (or lack of them)!

I can see why the regulations might need tightening up but (and probably like many readers) I've not checked the details of what I'm opting into. I've stopped reading the preamble and haven't checked what precedes the boxes I've ended up ticking. Goodness knows what I might have signed up to! I've also received quite a number of these emails from companies that are completely alien to me... I've come to the conclusion that some clever (but unscrupulous) marketeers have used GDPR to expand their 'fully-requested' lists.

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole GDPR thing could have been thought through a little better, and that we'd at least have been advised on the best way of handling our databases? And while I'm on the subject, if you no longer wish to keep receiving KBzine, the 'unsubscribe' button is at the bottom of every page. I hope, of course, that you decide not to use it...

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Yours,

Jan Hobbs