FaceAche

Last week, like many others, I deleted my FaceAche account. I did it because of the latest hoo-hah about data leaks but in truth it hadn’t been used for years. I signed up because I need to try new technologies and for a while it was useful but I lost interest after a couple of years. I checked this morning and it’s still there – apparently it remains there for 14 days and if I log back in, it won’t delete. Thoughtful.

LinkedIn seems to be almost entirely populated by chancers these days but I can see its purpose. My mouse was searching for the mythical delete button but for the moment I’ve left it be. But not without a look at my security settings. Writing this has made me take another look.

It seems an odd coincidence that as the ArseBook stuff was hitting the headlines, Voipfone, like a huge number of other UK and other European companies, is spending a lot of time and resources in making itself GDPR compliant. At first I was massively resentful of the diverted effort but as we get the work behind us and in the context of the CookedBook scandal it seems to make a lot more sense.

I’m also aware that all these huge companies that we give our data to without a second thought – AboutFace, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn – are all American and are obviously not part of the EU which the GDPR covers. If you’re selling from eBay or Amazon, where is the data processed and stored and what is being done with it? All these companies will need to comply fully with GDPR if they wish to continue to operate within Europe and a lot of UK businesses that use their services need to get contractual statements from them to comply themselves. A quick check on Google’s website tells us that ‘We are working hard to prepare for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)’ so they, at least, are not there yet. Voipfone doesn’t use any of these companies – we do everything ourselves here in the UK.

And maybe this is a little indelicate but there are a few American VoIP companies over here too. They’re mostly marketing operations with their network back in the motherland. So where is their data stored and processed? And what are they doing with it? I don’t know but by the 25th May 2018 they’ll have to tell us.