GDPR, catching the unwary

Andrew Callard - Aimed Business

I’ve never been so popular as this last week. All my old friends and businesses I vaguely remember are getting in touch by email to thank me and ask me to stay on their databases. All because of this thing called GDPR, which comes into penalties after May 25th.
As I was putting the finishing touches to my own privacy policy it struck me there is one massive problem with this last minute effort by businesses.

Pseudo-phishersLots of businesses keep the email brief and then put a big button for me to opt back in. Great keeping it short and direct helps us time-poor recipients.

Often these are for businesses that are not on my normal email lists or sent corporately without my contact’s name. So I’ve no idea if the address is genuine. The opening line is usually reassuring, but also a bit scary. The second line urges action to avoid mutual disaster. And then there is that big button to press to start.

Start what exactly? Because let’s face it this is exactly the modus operandi of a spear phisherman trying to access my computer to extract data. Business behaviour being what it is we know that most companies have left it to the last week to comply. Perfect cover for the bad guys to sneak in. Ironically precisely one of the things GDPR is trying to prevent.
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Can’t wait for Monday for the emails telling me that I’ve been fined- because of course the ICO will have worked the bank holiday weekend to catch out even more of the unwary. Or would they really?

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