Thursday, May 10, 2018

Not sure about compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Not a likely FWIW reader - even if he were real.
As you might expect, because For What It's Worth is published on the Internet, it is available around the Whole Wide World (which, I have recently learned, is not what "www" stands for).

Nevertheless, much as I'd like to imagine Horace Rumpole decompressing at Pomeroy's after a hard day jousting with the Mad Bull down at the Old Bailey, sipping a generous glass of Chateau Thames Embankment, and calling up FWIW on his smart phone... it seems very unlikely that this blog would have much appeal much beyond the borders of County Cook.

However, if Rumpole or anyone else in chambers at No. 2 Equity Court were to call up FWIW, it is my understanding that they'd get the exact same page you're looking at, but with this notice superimposed:
This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies.
This blog is published by the Blogger service of Google, and Blogger slapped the above and foregoing notice on foreign incarnations of this blog without any exertion on my part. I dimly understand that this notice was added in order to comply with regulations imposed by the European Union.

I only recently figured out that the cookie notice is different, somehow, than the latest thing about which I'm getting frequent emails, viz., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The one difference I can actually explain is that the cookie notice has been around for awhile now but GPDR is only going into effect this month.

Beyond that, although I have attempted to work through the jargon-laden verbiage of the 'explanatory' articles Google provides, I have had difficulty actually determining what, if anything, Google actually wants me to do in order to remain in the good graces of Brussels-based bureaucrats who have no interest whatsoever in the judicial aspirations of Cook County residents.

I have read that "GDPR introduces significant new obligations for the ecosystem," but I have no real understanding of what that means. I thought that 'ecosystem' referred to birds and bees and dirt and trees and other living things in a given area -- but I find that Dictionary.com offers an alternative definition of ecosystem as "any system or network of interconnecting and interacting parts, as in a business: The success of Apple’s ecosystem depends on hardware/software integration...."

I guess I am a content provider -- Google/Blogger wouldn't be able to collect any information about blog readers unless folks like me provide content -- and given how many millions of content providers exist, this probably makes me analogous to a bug hiding under a fallen leaf on the forest floor of the Google/Blogger ecosystem.

As near as I can tell, the following appears to be the key passage in the various materials I've gotten from Google about GDPR:
You are not required to seek consent for a user’s activity on Google’s sites (we obtain that ourselves when users visit our sites). We are asking only that you seek consent for your uses of our ads products on your properties. We already require that certain consents are obtained from your users in the EEA, and we are updating those requirements in line with the GDPR. We encourage you to link to this user-facing page explaining how Google manages data in its ads products. Doing so will meet the requirement of our EU User Consent Policy to give your users information about Google’s uses of their personal data.
Well, now I've linked. And I hope that's sufficient to keep me from getting stepped on.

Time will tell.

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