Parrot Time Magazine

By the time you are reading it, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will have gone into effect.

This bit of European Union (EU) legislation was approved April 2016 and set to go into effect May 25, 2018. It replaces a previous law (the Data Protection Directive) and is aimed at standardizing the rules across the EU on data control and protection.

While it is put in place by the EU, it reaches far beyond that to any website or service that might deal with EU citizen. So if you run anything bigger than a local business page, you will likely need to conform to the rules.

And those rules are very precise with high punishments for even the smallest infraction.

The main focus is around the consent of a user for their data to be collected and used. All the ways any data is collected must be spelled out specifically and consent from the user begotten for it. Also, the user needs to be able to easily remove their consent, have their data deleted, or even transferred to another site.

Notification of cookie use is also vital. Since most modern sites use some kind of cookies to store information about a person or collect email addresses for a mailing list or site registration, you can understand just how many websites this will affect. Many may simply shut down out of fear of not conforming properly and being forced to pay a fine.

And such fines are rather extravagant.

An organization or company in violation of GDPR laws will be fined up to %4 of their annual global turnover, or 20 million euros ($24.6 million), whichever is bigger.

For the biggest technology companies which are making billions in profits every year, this could be a major loss hit if they were to break any rules.

If you have a website or web presence of any kind, you should make sure you are compliant with the rules soon!

The Parleremo community website, which is what this magazine, Parrot Time, was built around, will be taken offline by the end of May 2018.

The reason for this removal is partially due to the GDPR going into effect. Parleremo is a community, and as such handles a lot of data not only about its users but also that which they create, such as writings, recordings, and language logs. It will take some time to fully adjust all system to be GDPR compliant.

Mostly, the site is at least four years overdue for an upgrade. Technologies have changed and need to be replaced. Sections that were in place that are no longer useful or were never used will be removed.

We will endeavour to save all the existing data of the current residents, and hope to reopen by the end of the year.

The social accounts surround the website (the Facebook page, Facebook group, and Twitter account) will remain open and active, and we will be posting any major updates still on the "View From the Town" blog.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyone. We hope it will yield a much cleaner, modern, and useful website when it returns online.