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With effect from 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation comes into force. This act, presented in this eur-lex document, affects all enterprises, businesses and even private bloggers operating in the European Union - thus also including those based primarily outside the European Union but conducting business within.

Put very simply, this act has been brought into force to protect web-users from the 'third-party' activities particularly of larger organisations such as, but by no means restricted to, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and so forth. These 'third-party' activities generally include the selling of data for ludicrous sums of money to organisations who then profit from the demographics involved. These demographics are of value for marketing and politics - thus if you are particularly active on shopping websites, then the data compiled can be used to target specific products at you. But likewise, if you are a major follower of left-wing politics, for instance, then it can be used to target you with right-wing propaganda (and naturally, vice-versa) designed to mislead.

The new GDPR attempts to stop this misappropriation and misuse of data (it will not stop the hackers and spammers, if that's what you were hoping) by restricting what can be passed on and requiring a clear 'opt-in' to this data circuit. To this end, many large organisations have been asking subscribers to re-subscribe to newsletters to confirm their agreement to the new terms. Other organisations, like Garmin, are simply stopping their provision of cloud-services for the storage of semi-personal data.

Sabots Libres has never used its newsletter subscriber-lists for third-party commercial services and never will, in the same way that the sites remain completely advert-free. It is not our aim; our core-business is education and assistance and not to make money through webvertising. Since you, our subscribers, are subscribed through association or by actively opting-in, with our third-party and spam policies clearly stated, and with the possibility to immediately and completely remove your (very limited*) data from our database -as has always been the case- we consider the need for re-affirmation conter-productive for both Sabots Libres and the subscribers.

We hope you are in agreement with this stance and will wish to continue to receive our newsletters in the future. To alter or cancel your subscription, click here or on the link at the foot of this mail.

Thank you for your continued support.