Data Collection... Or Lack Thereof

First off, let me warn you ahead of time.  I didn't sleep well, I woke up too damn early, and I haven't had nearly enough coffee to be a courteous human being.   If you're down with that, please proceed.

I keep seeing and hearing about Europe's new data collection (supposed protection) law.  I'm unmotivated to do a goddamn thing about it.  It's Europe for petesakes.  They're on the rapid slide to a police state.  I'm here in the US, I never plan on visiting the EU, and I don't do police states, so they can kinda kiss my lily white cheeks, if you catch my drift.

However, since Blogger and the rest of the collective care and I use their services, I guess I should probably give a great goddamn about it.  I'll be researching it later when my brain is more fully engaged to see if and how this effects me.

But here's my less-than-informed answer to it all.  I don't collect data on my blog visitors or my newsletter subscribers.  Blogger collects data, which I rarely bother to look at.  And my newsletter service collects data, which I also don't bother to look at.  Sometimes I might see a jump in visitors to the blog and wonder why and then go to Stats and see where all the hits are coming from.  It's usually Eastern Europe.  Not sure what they're looking at over there and I don't really care other than in a purely curious way.  Like 'hey cool, someone from Lithuania has read my blog'. 

My general blog visits average around 35 people a post.  Sometimes it jumps to over a hundred.  Woohoo.  I'm burning up the internet there.  I have about a dozen newsletter subscribers who haven't seen a newsletter from me since sometime last year.  (Sorry about that, guys, but newsletters are a pain in the butt and since almost all of you stop here, too, I'm just repeating myself there.)

So, let's say I don't jump through all of the EU's hoops to adhere to their silly law.  What's the worst that could happen?  They find me guilty of something over there and request extradition from the US so they can punish me for doing something I don't actually do?  I'm almost at a point in my life where I'm ready to say "Bring it".  So much has gone wonky and stupid in this world, I'm about ready to take my chances.  I think if it weren't for the fact that I'm married and my actions might bring about ramifications for my husband, I'd tell them all to take their GDPR or whatever it's called and shove it where the sun don't shine. 

Ahem...

Anyway, right about now - since the law takes effect on the 25th - you'll be seeing people asking for you to resubscribe to their newsletters so they can make absolutely certain they're adhering to the law.  I'm ignoring those, too.  I don't actually read 90% of the newsletters I'm signed up for, so I probably won't notice if they stop arriving.  If you've signed up for a newsletter and you get it and you decide you don't want to get it, you can always unsubscribe.  It's not that hard.  If you stop at a blog, this or any other, and you're worried about having your data collected, don't visit there anymore. 

I can't speak for anyone else, but I know your data isn't being collected by me for any purpose.  And if Blogger is worried about it, they can certainly stop collecting data on my behalf.  No skin off my ass. 

And as I said before, I haven't researched this and I'm grumpy, so if I've said anything above that is incorrect or whatever, deal with it.  I'm off to find more coffee before my head implodes.