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GDPR – delightful, said no one ever!

Some of you may be aware of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliancy laws that have to be in place by May 25, 2018. Especially if you have a blog, website, online business, or in any way, shape, form, or fashion collect peoples’ information. Like for a blog post update or email newsletter, or just by the mere fact your website generally places a cookie on a visitor’s computer to make browsing your site a better experience for the visitor.

Now, all this stuff came up on my radar literally week before last. Learning of what all was entailed in letting my visitors, customers, blog, and email subscribers be assured that their information is safe with me and my shops was daunting, to say the least. If you’ve been receiving lots of emails lately with notices of updated policies, visiting sites with a cookie notification banner (which I have on my site now), or other similar oddities the GDPR is why. I have watched webinars, joined Facebook groups, and done little else but try to make sure I’m compliant. I honestly thought I had a privacy policy on my little site here and was horrified to find I didn’t! Even one just saying that I don’t sell your email addresses! Which I absolutely do not, by the way.

So, I now have a Privacy Policy and a site Terms of Service in place and they may still be evolving a bit as this new rule comes into play. Also, a cookie notice at the bottom of my website. Cookies are used by pretty much every website to help our user experience. They typically expire after a certain amount of time and do not, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, do not collect any personal, identifiable information.

One thing I have learned about myself – I am very much reactive as opposed to proactive. I literally thought “okay, that’s it I’m done” for two days. Close the site, the shops, the social media, the whole kit and kaboodle. But, I kept reading, disconnected some things that keeps more information that I need or even, frankly, know how to digest. Like Google Analytics. The techy stuff that goes on behind the scenes – the cookies – I haven’t a clue of how that works. I just want to make pretty things, show you what I got, and give you occasional freebies! lol

I updated my email newsletter signup form to MailChimp’s GDRP compliant addition, which as of now is sadly unimpressive. I’ve redirected the signup form to a page that tells peeps they need to be sure to tick a box on the form besides just their name and email. I took down the signup link in every single Etsy product description I have as the link address changed with the new form. I just hope I have remembered where all I had the original link.

So, just an FYI, if you receive any re-consent emails from me, GDPR is why. There will be no hard feelings if you decide to opt-out. Just be aware that if I don’t receive a “yes” to stay in, I’ll have to go in and manually remove any who didn’t respond.

So, while all this has been quite the nightmare for me – a solopreneur – I just want all of you to know that I value the trust you place in me by visiting my site and signing up for blog post updates or the email newsletter. I’ve dropped the “VIP Club” name from the email newsletter because in the near future I plan on creating a resource library to house freebies, both old and new, for y’all to grab.

Have I mentioned what a pain GDPR is??? It’s a good thing, no doubt, but still! Sigh …

As always, thanks for visiting!

-Lisa

(Post updated 9/23/19)

1 Comment

  1. […] me on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll know the reason behind my absence. Not long after my last post, my dad was having some dizziness issues and went into the hospital just after mid-September. Three […]

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