GDPR and this website.

In light of GDPR - the new European Law named General Data Protection Regulation [wikipedia link]- which comes into effect on Friday May 25th 2018 and which seems to cover the collection and usage of personal information with a particular emphasis on email addresses and mailing lists, I would like to make the following observations:

This new law, arises from the European Union, but with today's global economy, will impact on people's interaction with each other across the world. There are punitive sanctions for breaches of the law.

My understanding is that GDPR is designed to regulate businesses in particular, but some commentators are including interaction between individuals in their discussion of the issue.

I am writing this to state my position for this website and the data included here.

This website is the product of my own family history research which I have chosen to publicise in the hope of finding new 'cousins'. There are only dead people here.

I may have your personal information including your email address in my records because you have contacted me to discuss a point you have found in my research. I may have contacted you for the same reason. I cannot see how we might communicate in this way without having each other's email addresses!

I make every effort to ensure any personal information is protected- and I have worked particularly hard in recent times to achieve this - cleaning up old research and checking that living folk are not identified in memos and sources.

I don't offer services via the website, but I do invite you to contribute via PayPal to the cost of the upkeep of this site (currently this goes to my personal PayPal account, and I pay charges on what you send!). I don't offer a mailing list facility and I don't have a blog, but I do invite you to come over to my Facebook group to chat with me and others there, and I do invite you to email me if there's something you have found on the site and would like to discuss. I don't believe any of these things constitute what GDPR is about.

Any interaction that we may have via Facebook or PayPal is governed by those websites and not by me, so it is their GDPR statements you should look at in those cases.

If you are bothered by any of this new legislation and how it might affect our relationship, I hope this clarifies my position. If you discover something I have missed - please contact me in whatever way you are comfortable with - and I will make every attempt to rectify it. I hope you find something of interest and I hope you continue to speak to me about our mutual relatives as we have done in the past.

Pat Carson

23rd May 2018

reviewed 15 August 2024