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Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Tech Tuesday's Tip - GDPR Compliance, continued



A little more on my efforts to comply with GDPR - the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect on May 25.  I first talked about this in an earlier post.

I'm still working on a more detailed privacy policy (elaborating on the one currently at the top of the sidebar), but in the meantime, I did find an e-mail subscription service, MailChimp, that advertises itself as GDPR-compliant (if you use GDPR fields in sign-up forms to collect consent).  I also chose MailChimp because others I respect use it, and because they offer a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.  This should work fine for me with my four-that-I-know-of e-mail subscribers to my blog posts (no marketing or selling).

It took a little tweaking (like all of the holiday) to get it to work.  I discovered that it is best NOT to send my blog post subscription e-mail messages from a Gmail or Yahoo account.  It seems to be working fine with our Charter.net address, so I'm about to start them tonight.  If you subscribe to my blog (under "Follow by E-mail" in the sidebar to the right), and if there is new content, you will get an e-mail no more than daily at 1 a.m. Central Time.  If there is no new content, then no e-mail notice.

Besides sending from Gmail and Yahoo, there can be problems for recipients with those addresses, so I've subscribed three of my own just to monitor them.  If you have such an address and can let me know if you're getting the blog post update e-mails and they look alright, I would appreciate it! 

I do ask for your first and last name in the sign-up process.  That's because, with Gmail in particular, the blog post update e-mails are more likely *not* to be treated as spam if they are addressed to your real name (with the magic of mail merge) rather than "ABT UNK Reader."  If the latter is what is showing up in your messages and you'd like it changed, let me know and we can fix that.  I also enabled double opt-in for sign-ups to further protect my readers' privacy.  That, and a required reCAPTCHA while signing up, will hopefully turn away spambots and discourage other spammers.

As it happens, one of my four readers e-mailed me separately to tell me his e-mail address had changed, and he has already re-subscribed with MailChimp.  I'll be contacting the three other legit Feedburner subscribers and asking them to resubscribe.  I also picked up another new subscriber yesterday thanks to a blog post share in a Facebook group.  I hope more of you will sign up too.  Welcome!

And now - hopefully - back to some REAL blogging!


© Amanda Pape - 2018 - click here to e-mail me.

2 comments:

  1. Isn't this GDPR compliance a mess? It sounds like you're making good progress with the changes. I wish Blogger hadn't taken away email notification of comments. Ah, well. It will all get sorted out, I suppose.

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    1. I agree, Nancy, it is a mess. It caused me to make my book blog private (no one else was reading it anyway), pull all my posts out of a group blog I was involved with (because the administrator hasn't participated in years and there's no way for me to make that blog compliant), and discontinue a work-related blog (no one was reading that either). With this blog, though, I hope to contact more German and Lithuanian relatives, so I felt I needed to at least try to be compliant. Thank you for commenting!

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