GDPR and automated email marketing
gdprhq.io
gdprhq.io
There is a whole swathe of companies that is somewhere between casual and negligent with email addresses, and it would be my distinct pleasure to have a stick like GDPR to beat them with.
Laws like this are broad and overreaching, but they are rarely enforced.
It is just now becoming enforced (with all its sanctions), after the two-year transition period.
And I’m eager to see how my request will be handled.
Do you have any suggestion? You seem pretty accustomed to it.
I wanted to know if emails are enough, but you already answered that. I'll need to test how numerically "a few" is.
My fear is that the process will take too much effort, it would be useless if rules were not enforced.
So everyone will get at least some benefit. But ya, it'd be great if other governments took this as seriously.
I happily reference the FTC documentation of this act whenever I see spam coming in after having unsubscribed. Funny, I can’t seem to recall any instance where the spam then continued...
> We've added new features to Azure! Read this advertisement!
> ...
> This message from Microsoft is an important part of a program, service, or product that you or your company purchased or participates in. Microsoft respects your privacy.
> [Lack of unsubscribe intensifies]
To customize what's included in this email, who gets it, or to unsubscribe, set your Message center preferences. If you are receiving this email because your Admin added you as a recipient, please contact your Admin to unsubscribe.
Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our Privacy Statement.
> Note: As an Azure customer, you are receiving this email because we are required to notify you of product changes that may affect your subscription. This is the only communication that you will receive directly from Microsoft regarding these product changes.
>This message from Microsoft is an important part of a program, service, or product that you or your company purchased or participates in. Microsoft respects your privacy. Please read our Privacy Statement.
with no option to unsubscribe
Just to make it clear - I'm not working for Microsoft or anything like that.
But the government probably wouldn't like that very much.
* Nigerian scam type spam
* ads/commercial spam
The first is already illegal, and yes, it's difficult to fight and comes from first world jurisdictions.
But the second is operated by well known companies, most of the time through well known service providers (Salesforce, Adobe...). And these companies do put a lot of personal information in their databases (what did you buy, did you click on a specific link, did you open a specific email, etc).
I have been using the last 6 months documenting all of our company's processes that handle customer interaction and data (which is basically all our processes), created flowcharts of how data moves between us, third part providers and customers as well as creating a document for each of these flowcharts that pinpoint exactly how we are complying with GDPR for every sub-process.
If for nothing else, we now have a total overview of what we do and how we do it - in an easily shareable collection of visualisations and documentational material.
There were still a few processes that I could simplify and automate.
Does anyone have any idea how to actually do that? How do I prove that a given user actively checked a box?
Obviously make sure to otherwise comply with the GDPR as you do this.
In reality, I doubt there will be a practical difference to how it has been handled in the past here in Germany, where similar law has long been practice.
That means: your sign-up page needs a checkbox, that cannot be pre-checked, and that clearly states that it's an opt-in to receive these mails. This needs to be separate from any acceptance of ToS or anything else that is necessary for the transaction in question.
To verify the form submitter's identity, send a verification to their e-mail address (if you haven't already). Make sure the verification email does not already contain any advertisement itself.
a) been willfully unclear about what it means to subscribe to a list
b) changed what our mailings are like over time.
We can stop doing (a), with effort, but I don't see how (b) will ever go away. So this is going to be continuous, active effort with subscribers. I would like to think that very easy, reliable, one-click unsubscribe will be sufficient.
Even if you've been building up your mailing list for years, following generally accepted good practices, and only signing up genuinely interested recipients, it seems you could now to be in a position where either:
(a) when you signed people up, you provided sufficient information about what you would be sending to them and you can still produce evidence of that today;
(b) you need to contact everyone on your list to obtain explicit, specific consent for whatever you actually send to your list; or
(c) you have to remove anyone who isn't covered by (a) or (b) above (or delete your whole list).
As with so much about the GDPR, what will be accepted as reasonable evidence of informed consent for earlier subscribers to a mailing list is ambiguous, and the consequences of either doing too much or not doing enough are undesirable.
Of course, from a security standpoint where the attacker is assumed to be totally untrustworthy, this is all nonsense since it would be trivial to fake. It does require a certain amount of trust that the company that will not stoop to faking documents.
I guess you could continue the charade by putting timestamped screenshots on a blockchain :-)
Like T&Cs, everybody knows that most people don't read them. Nobody's going to start quizzing their user, so what's a reasonable compromise? Forcing the user to at least scroll through some (or all) of it before agreeing. You make it clear that the intention is for you to read it, and that you're agreeing to something you should have read.
All you have to do to comply with it is be clear and direct when collecting personal data, and make a record of the permission granted.
Things like proper confirmed opt-in help.
It appears that you also need to have been all of those things, as far back as you've been collecting personal data, even if no such requirements existed at the time. Organisations might not be in that position even if they followed accepted good practices when signing people up to their lists, so the GDPR may have unintended consequences here.
In particular, the consent requirements are significantly stronger under GDPR than under either the 1995 directive itself (95/46/EC) or the implementations of that directive in various member states.
Organisations that followed reasonable and honest practices at the time of collecting personal data, for example when setting up a mailing list, could still find themselves out of compliance under the new rules.
Neither do I. It's the organisations who were complying with the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and generally accepted good practices at the time and still won't be compliant under GDPR that I'm worried about.
As a concrete example, every single charity that I support regularly has written to me at some point over the past few months, in order to get the kind of explicit consent they apparently believe they need to continue communicating with their supporters exactly as they have been for years before.
Now, there are really only two possibilities here. One is that all of those charities have this wrong, despite their resources and surely having taken professional legal advice on their particular situations. The other is that the usual HN suspects who maintain that the GDPR isn't a big deal and doesn't change much in practice are underestimating the concerns the GDPR raises for these legitimate organisations wanting to send legitimate communications to people who have previously been happy to receive them.
Since those exercises mean my donations are being wasted on red tape instead of their intended purposes like literally helping to cure cancer, I think it's fair that I have a problem with that.
But equally, you're leaving out the possibility that charities really were clear and honest about what they would like to send and really did provide a genuine choice, yet would fall foul of one of the technical requirements under GDPR that wasn't in force at the time. This is probably the case for most if not all of the charities I support myself, so absent evidence to the contrary I have to assume it was widespread practice.
People keep talking about the "spirit of the law", but there's a danger that this becomes a euphemism for "what I wish the law had said, even though it didn't". Usually when people contrast the spirit of the law with the letter of the law, they are making a point about avoiding the obvious purpose of legislation by relying on legal technicalities or subtle implications that most people wouldn't pick up.
In this sort of case, I don't see how it's against even the spirit of previous data protection law if a charity clearly and honestly stated that it would like to send information to donors about how their money was being used, which probably many donors would indeed like to receive, but for example they checked the box by default. There was an explicit provision for businesses to send marketing mail to previous customers or prospects without requiring consent at all, as long as it related to products or services similar to what the recipient had been interested in before and as long as some reasonable requirements about opting out were met, so clearly this isn't some absurd idea just dreamed up by charity fundraisers.
There was no trickery involved. Not even slightly, not in even one case where I was choosing to be a supporter. The indications of what would or wouldn't be sent were invariably perfectly clear, and the only things that ever have been sent were in line with what was stated.
Again, "dark pattern" is too often used as a euphemism for "something I don't like". If you have a genuine option that is clearly shown, that's not a dark pattern. And if most of the people filling in the form are going to choose to turn on that option, I fail to see how having it turned on as the default is unreasonable either.
We're not talking about something presented deceptively in the middle of a long and complicated page full of other options to add some unwanted but chargeable extra on your holiday booking here. We're talking about charities doing important work wanting to show their supporters that the money they're donating is making a difference, and showing an immediately clear and readily understood option that is part of a short, simple form for supporters to fill in. They did ask for real consent. You just don't like how they did it, and I'm not sure why your personal opinion should outweigh widely established practice that was doing no real harm.
There are going to be organisations wasting time and money on reconfirmation exercises for mailing lists they've been building up for a long time because despite using double opt-ins, only sending relevant messages to people who genuinely want to receive them, and providing readily accessible options to opt out again, they didn't record exactly what the wording said on their web site on 13 April 2008 when someone signed up to that list.
Clearly the GDPR sets out different requirements now, but my original comment stands: things are changing, and this is going to introduce significant burdens even on a lot of organisations that were following reasonable and honest practices when they collected personal data before.
The fact that they're all contacting people saying "We need to re-gain permission under GDPR" just means that a bunch of organisations were, and still are, clueless about data protection. This, combined with the lack of fines, should be somewhat reassuring to the GDPR sceptics. The laws are widely broken; the regulator hasn't been seeking fines; this is unlikely to change in future under GDPR.
As someone supporting these charities and whose personal data is being used to send the updates on what they're doing, I (and others in a similar position) am the person who is supposedly being exploited undesirably and in need of protection here. And yet, as I wrote before, I was quite clear about what I was expecting to happen when I filled in each form, and none of the charities I deal with regularly has ever done anything I would consider abusive or beyond what I knowingly agreed to. I really would prefer it if they didn't have to waste their resources on this and instead spent them on whatever good work they would normally do, but since every single one of them has contacted me anyway, I have to assume that something about the GDPR-related changes is preventing that from happening.
I'm curious--what emails do you actually appreciate getting? Would you subscribe to marketing email with restraints? (e.g. only email me when items in my size are on sale). If you could change how email marketing works, how would you do it?
And whenever I receive marketing emails that I never subscribed for, I flag it directly as spam, although sometimes I ask the sender, just for fun, the source of my address. They rarely reply :-)
I keep my Inbox clean because otherwise I’m missing important messages. If it’s not important, it doesn’t belong in my Inbox. If I don’t know the sender and it tries to sell me something, it’s spam. If I don’t remember subscribing, it’s spam.
If you have my data, you will handle them in same manner as you would handle yours. You are not selling yours to get higher prices when buying something online? You are not selling your email account to spammers to get a lot of worthless emails to your email account each day? ... Now you wont do it withy my data either. It is so simple, you don't need any clarification. No special law or directive, no studying of GDPR... it just works. Oh you want me to receive unsolicited emails for your profit? You want me to get tracked? ... I will personally take care you will get a punishment and/or sue you personally.
What is so complicated here? Act in best interest of you customers, regarding the personal data, and you are safe, over whole EU. I don't understand what is the problem unless you are NOT ACTING IN THEIR BEST INTEREST, then it becomes vague (you need a way to circumvent GDPR, but you can't as it is not an IRS list but a conceptual law). Anyone having a problem with GDPR already knows the answer that solves the "problem". But wants to continue his habits.
Just state your problem and I will answer to you with advice where you wont get punished for breaking GDPR, just ask. But you wont, right? You know the answer, but you need a way to avoid it. Wont work.
Let me preface my question with the statement that I mostly love the GDPR, and I think it greatly improves privacy and digital rights and I will exercise some of those rights come May 25:th against companies that I feel have needlessly collected data on me.
That said I (as a data controller) think that in many cases that the guidelines are very weak or undefined on subjects like logs or backups. I (as a private individual) think that any deletion request should automatically apply to logs and backups, but also I (as a data controller and...) as a operator of a service see it as a problem to have backups be mutable and have large swaths of data need to be deleted from backups and logs.
Is there any way to reconcile these ideas?
Logs are destroyed each week and the customer will be notified. Also we anonymize ips and reverse lookups by hashing them, while we still can identify the same visitor.
I hope I was helpful :)
Most security-oriented regulations, and indeed so-called “best practice”, requires keeping logs for security auditing purposes for at least a year if not longer. They’re often the only tool you have to detect when and how a breach began.
It seems that yahoo really loves Sparkpost spam that goes straight to my mailbox even when sender domain is no-existent, not to mention any DKIM or SPF records; gmail is much better at catching those.
This is my experience for the last 2 years.
The regulation in GDPR is not new! It's a refinement of long existing law (in England this is the DPA, and PECR).
If it's illegal under GDPR it was probably already illegal under PECR.
All this stuff about "ZOMG we need informed consent before we send email"? You already need that.
1. Open DigitalOcean hosting for $5. With prepaid card they will let you do it, however port 25 will be blocked.
2. You don't need port 25 anyways. Download few lists of emails from online search and setup php_curl every 30 seconds to your competitor's landing page subscription ajax call.
3. Wait few months for them being slammed with $4MM fines as there will be unable to prove how they got that traffic in the first place :)