Guernsey Press

How hard will GDPR winds of change blow?

LIKE a data-driven version of the Beast from the East, GDPR sweeps in today after being on everybody’s radar for months.

Published

With the exception of a few overworked experts no one knows quite what to expect.

Will the General Data Protection Regulation turn everything upside down as businesses struggle to cope with a blizzard of new rules? Or will it be a damp squib, this decade’s version of the Y2K millennium computer bug?

Even after months of seminars, email advice and professionals offering expensive advice, the consensus is that no one outside the GDPR bubble can agree on what is required.

That has been illustrated all too clearly in the past few weeks as company after company has belatedly got with the programme and emailed about GDPR.

Some ask for permission to keep your details on record, some take it as a given and just want you to know.

Many of the former will no doubt be met by the delete button and a sigh of relief about one fewer piece of junk mail.

But that is just a tip of the iceberg. As the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrated all too clearly, the amount of data held on each of us tests the imagination.

The speed at which the Information Age has taken over every aspect of our lives has been unnerving.

That is what GDPR seeks to control, to get a set of standardised data protection rules in place across all the member countries of the EU.

People should be able to understand how their data is being used and how to raise complaints about its abuse, even if the breach is not in their own country.

That dream has been hard to hold onto even in the Channel Islands, where Jersey and Guernsey have gone down slightly different regulatory paths.

How strictly the rules will be enforced is another part of the mystery. Even with a period of grace it will take practical examples of companies doing it wrong (and right) to show best practice. Some will learn a painful lesson all too late.

For the ill-prepared, the coming months could be testing.