You probably noticed that a new European regulation came into effect last month: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). I’d been inclined to follow the advice of Matt Ballantine (@Ballantine70), who expressed a view (I think on the WB-40 podcast) that, if you were compliant with existing data protection regulation, you were probably compliant with GDPR (the problem being that many organisations may not have been compliant with existing regulations but the GDPR penalties are more severe so they’re now taking them seriously). After all, I already had a privacy policy and data protection notice; I have a banner warning about cookies. I thought I was pretty well covered.

And then I read Mark Vale’s post on Does GDPR apply to you as a Blogger? It seems it might. Perhaps.

So, with help from the funny, sweary people at Writers’ HQ, I updated the site’s Privacy Policy. Then I bottled it and left in the serious bits from the old Privacy Policy and Data Protection Notice at the bottom. I still have the other Legal Notice too. But I’m not a lawyer and I don’t even run a company. I’m just a bloke who publishes stuff on the Internet, when he has the time.

I’ve also stopped running ads on this site. Not really anything to do with GDPR but Akismet wanted to charge me $5 a month for spam protection on a “commercial site”. Since Google Panda (an algorithmic change a few years ago), I only make about that much each month on the ads (and hosting costs me another £8 or so)… so I binned them off. So this site is now exclusively funded from my own pocket. Except that I may need to put them back on for a couple of weeks to get the £1.86 that will tip me over the trigger point for payment of the £58.14 I currently have stored up with Google Adsense…