No one is opening those emails about privacy updates

> As a result, some email marketers stand to lose 80 percent of their marketing lists -- or face huge fines from the EU if they keep trying to email these people without permission.

Oh... no...

Because it would take ~76 days to read them all...

http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/readingPolicyCost-authorDraft....

My spam account was recently assailed:

https://i.imgur.com/bFyXgrf.png

Reading them takes time. Deleting them takes time. Dealing with them takes time. Posting this... ;-)

"and some are using them to unsubscribe."* Even better.

The system is working!

I've said before that "newsletters" are mostly just spam. Now the recipients have spoken. They don't want to hear from you.

This article is pretty bad. It gets a bunch of stuff wrong.

> The GDPR requires companies to send emails to people on their mailing list who have never bought anything, asking permission to keep emailing them

Emailing those people was already illegal under PECR. GDPR hasn't changed the legality of sending unsolicited email to people that you don't have a business relationship with.

> "People are not opting back in," says Michael Horn, the director of data science for digital marketing agency Huge. "It's one thing for your customers who don't have a relationship with the brand to decline and not respond, but you're also losing a sales channel."

GDPR does not force a business to get consent for all processing. This is a persistant myth. If you have an existing business relationship and you obtained the email address legally you can rely on legitimate interests.

> "You never read the terms and conditions when you sign up for some website.

GDPR requires companies to make their T&Cs a lot simpler and clearer. This is a good thing. If you know people aren't reading your T&Cs how can you expect those people to be bound by them?

> Under these regulations, companies are relatively free to send emails to customers who have purchased something from them. But sending email to non-customers is common practice in the email marketing world. A lot of companies ask for email addresses when you visit their web site, even if you don't buy anything. Others buy email lists from third parties.

This is what people are defending. Sending junk email to addresses that you've bought. Getting someone's email address for one purpose and use it for another. (And, again, these are already illegal under PECR).

> Although the GDPR rules are only for the EU, European citizens living abroad get the same protections.

No. GDPR applies to EU residents.

Someone somewhere is making a lot of money giving people terrible advice about GDPR.

And they're updated privacy policy still allows them to track whether people are opening e-mails or not... I wonder why most people don't seem to buy into the privacy claims :-)

It seems to me that the whole privacy notice thing is another version of the "bury them in discovery" tactic that lawyers use. Only a lawyer can read and understand all of these policies.

What we need are privacy notices that describe in plain language how a company's policy deviates from some standard privacy policy that we do take the time to understand.

If I were renting a car, I'd need to know how its operation is different from other cars. I don't need to read about how to do everything.

only becuase they offer zero ways to control data sharing and communication. it is a legal document, and as such as dense, useless, and meaningless for non-lawyers (even for lawyers not currently involved in litigation with either parties)

absolutely none of those email help the sender gets any closer to be gdpr compliant, but we knew that since the cookie fiasco. just more of the same.

where is everyone who were saying they would send the "nightmare gdpr letter to google" on day 1 of gdpr? claiming that no company in the world could comply? I guess nobody expected useless emails and popups with no data control options to be enough for every EU regulator.

Of course not. Nobody wants to read that shit. It's meaningless drivel to 99% of people. After a couple, you just consign them to hell unread.

> Most Americans are not opening those emails

Hmm, the only way they would know this is if they are tracking folks when they open the email, right?

It would probably not help or change anything for the average person, but I would love a Creative Commons style initiative for privacy policies. It should provide a quick overview and indicate what data is collected and how it is kept. I imagine that there must be some sort of similarities from one policy to the other to the kinds of data that are being collected and to the ways it’s being stored. Enough such that you could make a privacy policy out of those sort of easily indicated modular/progressive parts that Creative Commons provides for copyright licenses.

Much like nobody reads a Terms of Service agreement, the fine print, or anything else that is perceived as an obstacle by the user.

I suspect a large number of them are trashed or marked as spam.

In other news, water = wet.