You may have seen some articles around the internet speaking about the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law that comes into effect May 25th, 2018. To be quite honest, I’m still trying to grasp all the rules involved with this change and have read quite a few articles about it, which I will share here with you.
This law has to do with the privacy policies used with shared data accumulated by having people sign up to our blogs and websites. The law was written for EU citizens that visit websites and fill out their information to sign up for updates and also just to be able to comment on blogs. The catch is, even if we are not from the EU, as long as we have visitors to our blogs from those countries, we can be held responsible if our privacy policies are not clear. And from what I’ve read, there can be heavy fines for those who do not comply.
I am far from knowing everything as the reading about all this can be quite intensive, but I’ve learned that the bare bones of this is to do two important things: Make sure you have added the GDPR addition clause on any campaign emails you are sending to your readers by email. That way any new subscribers to your blogs and websites will automatically have signed and ticked off the appropriate boxes on the form when they sign up to receive your emails. Make sure you’ve added the new GDPR policy to your existing outgoing campaigns and any new mailouts by inserting it into the form on your provider’s page (I use Mailchimp). Be sure to send out a separate campaign to your current subscribers to allow them to re-confirm they have signed up to receive emails from you.
There is also a WordPress plugin we can add to our blog sites available that will get permissions before bloggers comment on our blogs. For those who are not self-hosted, I should think that WordPress will implement this plugin with their updates, but you should still get some sort of a notification.
I have created a new email campaign that will go out this evening to my subscribers of this blog. I would appreciate that any of you who have previously signed up to receive emails from me will comply by clicking on the ‘update’ button at the bottom of that email, which will enable you to continue receiving posts from me as I will be doing for those same emails I’ll no doubt be receiving in coming days and weeks from many of you.
The buzz is just starting to get more attention on the internet as the compliance date nears into effect. Like I said, I still don’t know the nitty gritty of all of this but I am going to share some very helpful links I came across where tips are offered on how to go about adapting to these changes.
Note: – If you are using Mailchimp, they have a preset form with GDPR compliance request inserted in the post you can send off to your current subscribers. Many popular email services have this ready for their subscriber lists, but it’s up to us to send them out.
Here are some links that will explain GDPR much better than I can:
From WordPress.com –https://en.support.wordpress.com/automattic-gdpr/
Thank you Hugh Roberts for this link for WP.com users – https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2018/05/14/new-privacy-features-and-updated-policies/
Great up-to-date info for bloggers – https://createifwriting.com/gdpr-faqs/
A great post from Nicholas Rossis on GDPR – http://nicholasrossis.me/2018/05/15/gdpr-and-authors-what-you-need-to-know/
Another insightful post on GDPR from author Doris Heilmann of 111 Publishing – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-gdpr-mean-your-blog-newsletter-website-doris-maria-heilmann/?published=t
Mailchimp help for adding GDPR to all forms – https://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts/management/collect-consent-with-gdpr-forms
More tools from Mailchimp – https://blog.mailchimp.com/gdpr-tools-from-mailchimp/
WordPress Plugins to download for compliance with GDPR to be included in comments and forms from your blog – https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/gdpr/
This process is ongoing and tedious, especially for non-techie bloggers. Some of the plugins require some code work and more, which I am clueless about. I have chosen to add this plugin below
I think my job is not yet complete after updating my mail out forms and adding the above plugin which should now ask readers to tick off a compliant box before commenting. I have seen a ‘Cookie’ banner pop up on many blogs I follow, regarding the policies used for cookies on a blog. Most of the plugins I’ve read about installing ask for some ‘techie’ tweaks to be done that I have no clue about. If any of you added that policy to your blog, would you be kind enough to share which plugin you used. I have just downloaded this one:
We bloggers all need to work together to help each other to stay informed of what we’re learning about this new law. If we don’t comply the fines are staggering amounts as you will read in the link above – Great up-to-date info for bloggers.
I hope I’ve helped here in some way and if any of you have any knowledge to contribute here, I welcome it in comments. 🙂
DGKayewriter.com 