GDPR - What have we done?

© UKC

I'm sure you will all have received emails in the last week about GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation. This is the new EU law that comes into force today. It aims to protect the data privacy of EU citizens and improve organisations' understanding of it - more information here.

At UKC and UKH, we have been working hard to make sure our data complies with the new law. Paul was up late last night making changes and we think we've got there. Some of the changes you will notice are below:

Newsletter Subscription

From today we will be moving over to the new list of email addresses of users who have opted in to receive our weekly newsletters. We started creating the new list a few months ago and thanks to our readers' dedication, we have managed an amazing success rate of resubscriptions. We have now had a 60% response from our previous email list but, more importantly we have around 90% of the number of readers actively resubscribed to the newsletter compared to the weekly open numbers of the previous list. Basically, we are now sending our newsletter almost entirely to the people who wanted to receive it and read it and this is almost equal to the number of users who previously received it. The UKHillwalking newsletter now has twice the subscribers it used to have.

For any business working with GDPR this is an astonishing success rate for resubscriptions and we are very grateful to everyone who has responded. It shows that you value this newsletter and want to receive information about what is on the site. For those few people who used to be happy to get the newsletter and haven't resubscribed, you can go to your User Profile in the top right-hand corner of the page - the Newsletter link is on the right-hand bar.

Cookies

We all love cookies...well actually we don't. Most of the time we never noticed them or what they did. Unfortunately misuse of cookies by some companies has played a large part in leaking our personal data and caused many of the problems which have led to GDPR. However, the vast majority of cookies actually make our browsing lives easier and more functional - it is a case of a few bad cookies spoiling the cookie jar.

You will have noticed the new opt-in cookie that appears at the base of this page. In that we give you the option to select which cookies you want to opt-in to - more detailed information on our cookie policy is here. The last box is the marketing box which some of you may be tempted to opt-out of. This is fine but please be aware that this means you are not able to watch YouTube videos or some other third party embedded content without opting back in.

We do use a third party site called Skimlinks which tracks UKC and UKH readers if they leave our site and go directly to other sites to buy stuff. This pays us a decent amount of money each year so we don't want to get rid of it, but it does generate a huge number of cookies, which makes the cookie list quite long and frightening. It doesn't have any impact on you if you don't go directly to buy stuff and none of your personal data is transferred to any third party, just the fact that you came from UKC before your buying visit. If you would rather not have these cookies then you can opt-out of marketing cookies, but you will need to opt-in each time you want to watch a video.

Competitions

We run a lot of competitions on UKC - around 2 or 3 a week sometimes. Most of these have an opt-in tick box for the third party mailing list and we also require a physical address to send the prizes to. We haven't changed much here but you can now edit or remove your address at any time through your user profile. If you leave your address there then it will auto-fill each time you enter a competition and if you win a prize then that address will be passed on to the third party for them to send the prize to, but not for any other purpose. You certainly don't need to worry about us ever sending you anything through the post!

So that is about it. There are still a few more things we will be implimenting, like to allowing you to download your data, but we think we have got there. Please feel free to feedback on the thread if you think we might have missed something.


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30 May, 2018

Just wanted to say thanks for the nice clear explanation of what you've done in response to the GDPR law. I now feel I've got a far better handle on what it's all about. You're the first company that's clarified rather than further obscured, from my point of view.

30 May, 2018

There was me thinking from the title that this was a cry of existential angst about the legislation. ;-)

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