On May 25th of 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect. This is a law passed in 2016 by the member states of the European Union that requires compliance with regard to how organizations store and process the personal data of individual residents of the EU. Now maybe you are thinking that this regulation does not apply to your organization because it is not based in the EU. Don’t stop reading just yet. This regulation applies to any organization that offers goods or services to EU residents and/or processes the personal information of EU residents, regardless of whether the organization is based in the EU or not . And the law does not apply only to the huge multinational companies of the world. It applies to small businesses as well. For example, consider an e-commerce business that sells Tshirts online, and it sells to people in the EU. Or perhaps an email marketing company that sends out periodic emails to EU citizens. Or even a message board website
