The 25th of May is here! By now, any citizen of an EU or EEA country must be aware what that date means. Or at least anyone in Europe who has an active email address that has been used to sign up for anything. It’s the big GDPR day!

Sweden was recently ranked as the most GDPR-conscious country in Europe where over 90% of mid-sized companies are aware of what it means. Based in Stockholm, I consider myself as the most EU-based citizen of the company (sure we’ve got people in London, but ever since the Brexit vote we all know they are dealing with an identity crisis) making me the preferred choice of who to share this post with you all.

Ready or not, GDPR has come!

With Ready or Not by the Fugees playing on repeat I just finalised the last few data information pages on our site. I’m pretty sure that means we’ve dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. And are pleased to announce that:

We are ready!

All our client should be happy to know that we are ready! For almost a year we’ve been working on changing our internal processes, investigating how our technology partners handle data stored about our clients and their subscribers, updating policies… We’ve been ready for a while and have spent the last two months trying to automate and improve as much as possible to make how we process data and requests to export or delete as smoothly as possible. If you want to know more details of what we’ve been up to take a look at our dedicated GDPR page.

So how is the world affected so far?

We’ve all received about sixty thousand emails with privacy policy updates. Some more relevant than others. Some showing a perfect misunderstanding of what GDPR actually covers and just informs me that my account is protected by a password (God, I would hope so – but haven’t they heard about encryption?!). Some companies have closed down. It’s cost European companies over 198 million Euro to get read. Created thousands upon thousands of new jobs. People feel important. The Internet has responded with the modern classic memes and clever tweets. Other than that… we’ve been waiting for the legislation to take effect to see what will actually happen.

GDPR drinking game: take a shot every time a company emails you to update their privacy policy/terms and conditions

— matt? (@mbellgb) April 24, 2018

So what now?

Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for. Will the world come to an end? For those of you who remember what it felt like waking up the morning after the millennia change (1999->2000) where droves of people were convinced there would be chaos or that they would wake up to new millions on their bank account due to dating errors – this is sort of the same. This morning I noticed that Instapaper and a few other US news sites have closed its doors for European visitors (at least temporarily) but the conversations on the subway still seem uninterrupted about the weather. Just like any other day.

So what will happen tomorrow? Who knows! But whatever happens, we’re ready for it. I just know I’m closing all the EUR-lex GDPR tab of my browser until it’s time for our monthly data review.