GDPR takes effect today – May 25 2018

GDPR regulation policy is taking effect today. Since I am located in Europe and owner of several websites I had to make lots of changes past week.

Looking from the good side of this regulation not as website and business owner, but as citizen of European Union. This is good change for my personal data. I will be able to request to completely destroy my personal details from any platform online and offline. Also I can request to see what personal data the particular platform is storing for me.

But looking on this as business owner and domain investor, this has some negative effects.

First day of GDPR I see three things happening

Getting flood of emails with updated privacy terms

It really comes from everywhere. Even some websites or applications that I signed up few years ago and forget that they exist. This is actually a good thing to remain you where your personal data is stored. I will take advantage of this to review all requests, but it will take me probably a week.

Domain Whois is now worthless

This is the most hated thing in GDRP regulation in the domaining world. It’s not able to see who is the owner of the domain name anymore, the email address is masked too. It’s complete darkness. This post from Domain Investing blog says it all.

Domain transfers are more challenging now

I am not even sure how the domain transfers are going to happen. I read few articles about this, but for most of the registrars was unclear, because there is no final decision on that from ICANN. Guess we will find out when we need to do some domain transfer 🙂

Think year from now we can see the future of GDPR. This can be a good thing if it’s regulated correctly.