European Union Implementing New Privacy Regulations
By now you’ve almost certainly seen or heard something about GDPR—General Data Protection Regulation—the EU data privacy regulation that goes into effect on May 25. Even if you don’t do business with citizens of the European Union, you still may need to update your website in order to comply.
If you currently do business with or plan to do business with EU citizens in the future, many changes may be required. In that case, this regulation should be much more important to you and will extend beyond the scope of your website.
We cannot provide legal counsel, but most businesses based entirely in the United States who do not conduct business with EU citizens may need to perform some relatively simple tasks like scanning their websites for any instances of EU country names (e.g., in Country drop-down boxes) and eliminate those, and ensuring any digital marketing efforts exclude all EU countries.
Enforcement and Additional Resources
While enforcement mechanisms for businesses based entirely in the US (with no EU presence) still range from blurry to non-existent, depending on what you read, GDPR compliance on your website (and elsewhere) is something we encourage you to carefully consider.
More information is available at GDPR.EU, Wikipedia, and numerous other resources. If you have any questions about how GDPR may apply to your website, or what changes may be needed to achieve compliance, please contact us.
