What's the Geek Take on the GDPR?

Let us know how the GDPR is affecting your work.

Image removed.

The amount of geekery and hackage required to bring companies into compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR) must be huge. I say that for five reasons:

  1. The fines for violating the regulation's rules are attention-forcing (up to 4% of global turnover in the prior fiscal year).
  2. The deadline for compliance is May 25, 2018, just 77 days from now.
  3. Nearly every booth at every tradeshow I've been to in Europe during the last year or so features the GDPR in its promotional verbiage. (The image above is courtesy of the PORT.im booth at the PIE 2017 conference last November in London.)
  4. Many (maybe all) the developers I know and work with are busy addressing the GDPR as a Big Issue.
  5. All that compliance stuff must require a lot of new technical work.

So I'm looking to get some perspective on this from geeks doing that work, and from others who simply know about it and have useful tings to say. If you're in either group, please weigh in on the comment stream below. Thanks!

Doc Searls is editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, where he has been on the masthead since 1996. He is also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Basic Books, 2000, 2010), author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), a fellow of the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow of the Berkman Klien Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He continues to run ProjectVRM, which he launched at the BKC in 2006, and is a co-founder and board member of its nonprofit spinoff, Customer Commons. Contact Doc through ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

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