GDPR and your right to data privacy
By now, you've probably experienced a steady stream of emails landing in your inbox, all pertaining to the privacy policies of online services that you use. You read them all before giving your consent, right?
Well, maybe you tried, until you realized that many of them are extremely long.
The catalyst for these policy updates is a thing called the EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short, and it goes into effect tomorrow, 25 May 2018.
The new regulation states that if a company wants to collect user information and store it, then the individual must give active consent for doing so.
The stated intent of GDPR is that everyone has a right to privacy – including online. These days, however, so much information is collected about us that it's nearly impossible for us to actively control what we do and don't want to allow. But with time, companies may actually decide against storing unnecessary data instead of making their privacy policies longer.
Why is storing personal data such a sensitive matter?
Here are a few examples that answer the question:
- Almost half UK businesses suffered cyberattack or security breach last year, figures show (The Independent)
- Twitter urges all users to change passwords after glitch (Reuters)
- List of data breaches (Wikipedia)
- Data of almost 200 million voters leaked online by GOP analytics firm (CNN)
- NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog (Reuters)
Do you trust every existing and future holder of information about you? Forever?
To keep data 100% safe, forever, is simply not realistic, so not saving the data in the first place is the only option.
Want to better protect your privacy? Begin with our simple steps to change your online habits.
Mullvad's privacy policy
We do not store activity logs of any kind. In fact, we strongly believe in having a minimal data retention policy because we want you to remain anonymous.
We also believe in exhibiting transparency about the data we do handle, so we have updated our website to bring even more clarity to this topic.
First, our no-logging data policy is now our privacy policy. To this we have added sections on cookies, how we handle emails and problem reports, your right to a registry extract, and your right to be forgotten.
In addition, in the few places on our website where you might choose to send personal information either to us (such as to recover a lost account) or to a third party (for example, if you pay for our service using PayPal or Stripe), we have included an explanation and a link to our privacy policy.