A few years ago the European Union introduced GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) as a way of regulating how the internet operates within its borders. These new rules primarily centred around data handling and confidentiality apply to all who have dealings with the EU whether from within or from other continents. For example, as a post-Brexit Brit, I still apply GDPR principles to what I do because of my dealing within the EU.
If you are a webmaster by the way be careful because there is a Wordpress GDPR plugin - designed to make your presence compliant - that carries malware and at least one provider (one.com) will take your site down for safety reasons until the issue is resolved. This ultimately means going into your File Manager and deleting the specific corrupted files.
Anyway nowadays what it means is that almost every site has the "Accept Cookies" banner appear as soon as the site page is loading and most of us just blindly click "accept cookies", or "accept necessary cookies". In many ways this is no different to what most of us do with EULAs when loading software.
We are always being told to read them through, but few of us ever bother (yes I am guilty too).
Now call me a cynic but with us not reading such documentation it is very possible that unscrupulous site owners slip something in that shouldn't be there. While GDPR says that the client has to actively opt into anything and by default the opt out button should be selected this might not always be the case.
Example. I have recently joined CoinPayU and I am generally happy with them. However, on at least two occasions, clicking the PTC link has initiated a download which I never agreed to. Fortunately I am aware of the risk of opening such downloads but it should never have happened. Downloads should have been "opted out" as a standard GDPR approach but they weren't
It just set me to thinking what else are we blindly agreeing to and even more so has GDPR created a greater potential security risk when it was designed to do the exact opposite?
Over the last couple of weeks I have gone back to blogging on here after being very active before I started making babies with MamaRah. Now as many of you know, I have Little_Rah and Tiny_Rah and so life balances all changed. However, I have enjoyed returning to one of my loves, namely writing, and so while I will not be posting everyday I would like to return to doing so more often. This might be made a bit easier because as of next week Little_Rah, now almost three and a half will be going to preschool leaving just Tiny_Rah - coming in at almost six months - at home with us during the day. So my hope is to be around a bit more often than I have been since the family began expanding.
As always stay safe and well my friends.
