You, like everyone else, will have been inundated over the past few weeks with emails asking you to opt in or out of contact with organizations you didn’t even know had your email address as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its a bit of an open question if community clubs like ours are covered by the GDPR, but its principles are sound so we have been working over the past few months to adopt them anyway.
The basic idea behind the GDPR is limit the amount of personally identifiable information that floats around the world (and especially the internet and corporate organisations) about you…stuff that you’d most likely forgotten you’d ever given in the first place. Within the Sting we have spent a lot of time ‘spring cleaning’ things like email and filestores to remove a lot of this accumulated crud and, with the end of the formal season at the end of May, there will shortly be more opportunity for us to remove even more stuff.
What does this mean for you? Well, in general, not too much, although it does mean we probably haven’t got an email you sent us six months, or two years ago, any more! It also means that going forward we will strive to keep only those data we absolutely must retain (personal contact details, medical records etc.) and we will, in general, not have those available online. It also means that if you are a volunteer within our organisation there will be a set of guidelines for you to follow next season about the data you handle, and there is a ‘Data Handling Policy’ in draft which will shortly be added to the documentation store. None of this will be difficult to deal with, it will just need a change of mindset to go from “I’ll keep this just in case” to “Do I absolutely need to keep this?”.
Please note that the external services and organisations we use such as TeamApp, Facebook and the EIHA will all have their own GDPR arrangements and you will need to consult with them to find out more about their policies. In general the only organisation we pass your information along to is the EIHA and we will clearly indicate what information we are sharing with them on the registration forms for the upcoming season.
