The thoughtfulness of my family and friends enrages me...

You don’t need to wait until May ‘18 to be GDPR compliant.

In April, I celebrated my birthday. I’m a lucky boy, so I received a wide array of gifts from my assorted friends and family. Really nice presents actually. In fact, exactly the types of things I wanted and needed. Great right? Wrong. The thing that has disturbed me, and to some extent enraged me is what led to these people deciding on what to buy me.

Let me explain.

It would appear, that when I interact with my family and friends, they actually began a process of listening to the types of things that interested me, making a note of the music I was listening to, the books that had caught my eye and the clothes I aspired to wear. It seems that they began to build up a picture of exactly the items that I would like the most. Pretty creepy stuff really, quite invasive and I have questions on how compliant they all were with the Information Commissioner’s Office or GDPR.

It doesn’t stop there though. As they began to build these theories about what I might like, they started to test the theories in ways that I didn’t realise or notice at the time. It might be a conversation, maybe a shared tweet or an email forwarded to me. In some cases they recommended things that I’d never even thought of, but were perfectly in tune with my preferences. On the surface this seemed ok, but I now realise there was something much more sinister going on, and I hadn’t even given them permission to contact me.

In short, they had been collecting precise and well researched information that I had made available to them, and using it in an attempt to make me happy. I feel like I’ve been spied on and lied to.

Now if you’ve just read all of that, and thought that I was some kind of ungrateful, somewhat paranoid monster, you’d be right. And I don’t really feel like that. I love that my friends and family know me well enough to buy me the right presents. So I suppose the question I’d ask is this:

Why do we get so hung up about companies collecting our data for pretty much the same reason?

Ok, they’re not always trying to give us presents, in a lot of cases they’re trying to sell us something. But if they’re personalised to the information they have about you isn’t that better than being sent random stuff?

As with most arguments, it’s probably not that black and white. The challenge for businesses is to work ever harder at using the data they do have and communicating with their customers about things that are important to or of interest to them.

GDPR will have an impact on how companies deal with your information, the access you have to it and the control you can wield on how they use it. It is, quite rightly, pretty big news. And you, like me, have probably been invited to many a webinar/seminar/event on what you need to do and why you need to take notice.

At Purple we’re committed to being the best in market at this and we launched our solution 10 months early so our end users and our clients can get the maximum value from it.

If you’re an end user logging in to one of the venues we support, you’ll be given your own Profile Portal that you can use to access and update your details - such as being able to decide which companies can contact you. Hopefully this means that we will have achieved one of our original aims of giving users a fantastic guest WiFi experience.

If you’re a venue, you’ll have access to GDPR compliant, opted in data on your customers. There will be no ambiguity on this opt in and you will be able to sleep at night after sending out an email. We’ve always taken care of the regulatory headaches for our customers, and GDPR will be no different. Again, this means we’ll continue to achieve our aims of providing businesses with the analytics to understand their customers and the tools to safely improve engagement and your relationships with them.

If my family read this, there is a good chance I’m not going to get any presents in April, even if I do wait patiently. You, on the other hand don’t need to wait to be GDPR compliant. You can “unambiguously opt-in” to this now.