What Happens To Your Business Model Under GDPR

GDPR comes into full force this month following a 2 year period for transition,in which organisations were meant to adjust operations, systems and data to comply.

Central to this is the need for explicit consent to collect and hold someone's data. The data must also be limited to that which is necessary and must not be used for any other purpose than that for which it was collected.

This has major implications for many organisations whose business is based upon consumer knowledge, such as credit rating agencies. Much of their data has historically been collected from multiple sources and aggregated. Gaps have often been interpolated and many associations have been assumed. According to a raconteur article, one industry analyst claims that people in the industry believe it to be only 50% accurate!

This probably explains, why some of the credit agencies have been keen to let people sign up and check their profiles so that they could "clean their credit history". In fact the people have been paying to correct their own data! So the credit agencies have been paid to obtain a free service, improving the quality of their data.

It is difficult to see how this model will continue in the future. As consumer trust in online use of their data is dropping rapidly and has been one of the factors why many millenials have "divorced facebook".

Another impact of GDPR is that the scope of what counts as personal data is now wider and includes things like cookies and url links. Without express permission these cannot be collected or used for things such as driving targeted advertising to your browser. This is going to affect the business model of companies like Google who rely extensively on advertising revenue.

How it all pans out will be interesting as there are other ways in which advertising can be targeted, but at least there may be more semblance of control over what happens.

Though perhaps the best benefit will be avoiding the flurry of junkmail for car insurance and house insurance when the anniversary of a purchase is imminent and traditionally insurance agreements are renewed.