GDPR - businesses are waking up but are we?
25th May 2018 - it's just over a year until the General Data Protection Regulations come into force. From this point on, organisations who provide products or services to EU citizens will need to abide by the new rules (regardless of where they are based) or face the rather scary consequences. I'm not going to talk about the Principles or Rights here (attend one of the events run any good data specialist consultancy if you don't know about them yet). What I am going to do here is think about how 'consumers' could react once the rules come into force. Firstly, do people even care about data protection regulations? You can look in any newspaper and read stories of data breaches, lost laptops, hacks and so on to get an idea of the possible level of knowledge. Everyone who is even a little bit savvy about modern business practices will know that sometimes their data could be lost or stolen. However, how many people actually react to these events? Were you one of