Use all those GDPR privacy policy notifications to clean up your inbox and kill zombie accounts

GDPR Compliance: Clean up your digital footprint, start with email

Now, take a moment to check your email—maybe your work email, your personal email, or a fake email you used to secretly participate in an online baking competition. A quick search for "GDPR" and you may find a large number of recent emails from service providers, websites, applications and other companies informing you of changes to their privacy policies. I found dozens of emails like this.

This is happening because a comprehensive digital privacy initiative called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect in Europe on May 25 (tomorrow). While the ordinance only applies technically to EU citizens, it prompted many companies to comprehensively update their privacy policies and user agreements in advance to avoid the high fines they may face for GDPR violations. For some companies, it is also easier to develop a set of documents for all users.

The influx of emails is annoying, but you can turn this negative into an opportunity to take a look at all the websites, mailing lists, and other digital content you may sign up for. You may even find some surprises.

Apps and Services

If you are a social media user, now is a good time to log in to your account and check your security and privacy settings. Both Facebook and Twitter have recently updated the way you control your data. To view Facebook, start with your privacy settings, and then make sure to view and deactivate any old apps associated with your account but are not in use. You can do the same for Twitter on this page.

You should do the same with your Google account, which may be much cleaner than your social media subscription, but it is still important to stay following. Click here to view the apps you have connected to your Google account.

While large social media networks are relatively easy to track, you may also find that you have some old accounts that have never really started. I found an account in a service called Mylio, which was supposed to be a major player in the field of photo sharing and storage. I haven't logged in for over three years, but this GDPR update reminds me to go in and delete this zombie account, which saves many of my photos to the cloud.

Email Newsletter

Gmail's promotional tags can easily ignore email newsletters, but like many empty pizza boxes stuffed under the bed in a college dorm, they still exist and don't do you any good.

There are some services that claim to help you unsubscribe from various mailing lists, but they are almost always accompanied by serious costs. For example, Unroll.me is a popular service, but it crawls and sells information from users’ mailboxes in exchange for collation. This is a bad deal.

Most email newsletters include an "Unsubscribe" link, usually at the bottom of the email. If you are dealing with a formal company, this is usually enough to get you off the list. If the link takes you to an opt-out page, make sure you opt-out of everything, including messages from “partners”, as this is a marketing term that refers to “advertisers.”

If you receive a spam with an unsubscribe link, please do not click on it. For spammers, including a link that appears as "Unsubscribe" is a common strategy, when in reality all it does is confirm that your address is valid and mark it as the target of more spam . For spam, carefully mark it as spam instead of leaving them in your inbox to help the email system’s AI start to identify it as unwanted messages.

(Picture above: Check out our episodes about GDPR in our Tech Podcast last week)

Subscribe Service

There are services, such as free credit reporting websites, that rely on users to sign up for a free trial, and then forget to cancel and incur a permanent monthly service fee. These services usually require you to call to unsubscribe, hoping that they will keep you using it or keep you waiting until you give up. Don't do this. Also, do not register for a free credit reporting website.

Software and Product Registration When you register for new software, or even physical products, you usually provide more information than the company actually needs, especially if you no longer use the product. Do the old photo scanner software I purchased when I was in college really need to keep my information all the time? Probably not needed. Use this as an opportunity to clear as much information as possible and make sure the old service does not have the login information you are currently using, which is related to what you care about.

The above is the detailed content of Use all those GDPR privacy policy notifications to clean up your inbox and kill zombie accounts. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!