For the past month, your email inbox has probably been flooded with companies updating their privacy policies online. Maybe you even thought they were fake and receiving spam because of the high volume. But there is a major reason businesses like Twitter and Facebook are all updating their policies online. These companies sending them have been preparing for a new privacy law enacted by the European Union on May 25th known as the General Data Protection Regulation.

What is the GDPR?

These new European Union Guidelines are limiting how companies can use and process the personal data of consumer, giving the average person more control over their information and how a company can track them. Under this regulation companies need to explicitly ask if they can collect your data, they have to answer if you want to know what that data is used for, and they must give you the right to permanently delete that information. Companies also must warn the public about data breaches within 72 hours of them finding out.

GDPR in the U.S.A

So why would this be affecting people in the United States? Well any company that conducts business within the EU will have to comply with these standards or face high penalties. While the United States is not enacting the same privacy policy standards major corporations are enacting them in order to keep their websites functioning overseas. Those companies that have not caught up to the privacy standards have shut down their websites within Europe while they catch up on the back end.

What Will GDPR Change?

These new set of policies are changing the way people think about their data and how companies use them. Companies use data to make significant decisions about you and how they interact with you. While no policy change of this magnitude has occurred on the internet since 1995, experts say the GDPR is going to be the leader in new privacy policies around the globe. The internet and the way people share, store and send data has drastically changed since 1995. So, it will not come by surprise that even more regulations will come out within the years to come about how personal customer data is treated and handled.