If you’re like me, your inbox has been receiving a constant stream of “updates to our privacy policy” messages from seemingly every company you’ve ever interacted with. The timing is not coincidental: most of the notifications are the result of companies taking steps to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect next Friday, May 25th.
The GDPR was designed to introduce clarity and consistency to privacy laws in Europe, protect the data privacy rights of citizens, and change the way corporations approach data privacy issues. The gist is that if any party collects any personal data from European citizens or organizations, they must follow specific guidelines:
- They may only collect data for clearly-stated, legitimate reasons.
- They must identify what data they’re collecting.
- They must allow data subjects to see the data they’ve collected.
- They must provide a quick, easy way for data subjects to have their data deleted.
Europeans use the XPRTs quite a bit, and some of our community members live in Europe, so we’re taking the necessary steps to comply with the new regulations. Thankfully, we don’t have to change very much. We built respect for testers’ and community members’ privacy rights into our processes from the very beginning and we are committed to clarity and transparency regarding our data collection practices.
Our blog post on data privacy from last month contains more details about how the XPRTs handle your data, and we’ll update our privacy policies and data collection notices where necessary to make things as clear as possible.
We also want to make sure community members know that if they would like to leave the community and have us delete their name, username, and email address from our records, simple send us a message at benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com and we’ll fulfill your request within 72 hours.
If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please let us know.
Justin
