May 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect on May 25th, and no one is ready — not the companies and not even the regulators. After four years of deliberation, the GDPR was officially adopted by the European Union in 2016. The regulation gave companies a two-year runway to get compliant, which is theoretically plenty of time to get shipshape. The reality is messier. Like term papers and tax returns, there are people who get it done early, and then there’s the rest of us.

North Carolina should make sure that broadband internet companies don't interfere with residents' access to websites, said State Senator Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake County). He will file a bill to prohibit broadband internet service providers from inhibiting open access by blocking some sites, charging extra for 'fast lanes', or intentionally slowing or speeding service.

European lawmakers pilloried Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing for Facebook’s recent privacy and misinformation mishaps and raised the possibility of new regulation, a more realistic threat than what the social media giant faces in the United States. Opening a hearing with key leaders of the European Parliament, the body's president, Antonio Tajani, described it as an "alarming scandal" that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, could access the names, "likes" and other personal information of 87 million Facebook users. "The price paid by the users is in many cases data in exchange for f