As pretty much everybody now knows, new data protection regulations (GDPR) come in to force on 25th May this year, and like every other business, we've been taking time to review what data we hold, and how we process it. 

GDPR actually doesn't bring around many major changes from the old Data Protection Act, so any organisations who had high standards before, won't have many changes to make ready to be compliant under the new rules. 

Thankfully, epic.LAN is in that category. Many of the policies and practices we had in place to manage your data were already to a good standard, so we don't have much to do ready for the 25th. 

You will see a number of emails and changes coming out over the next 2 weeks or so, we've created this news post just in case you think any of the emails aren't legitimate, so you can come back here and check. 

Here's what to expect over the coming weeks:

• Anyone who has not used their epic.LAN account in over 2 years will receive an email saying their account will be deleted. To prevent that, all you need to do is log back in to your account and it will be extended. We're doing this so that we're not holding on to more data than we really need. 
• Once old accounts have been removed, we will be making minor updates to our privacy policy, just to explain a little more about how your data is used and why we collect it. 
• We will then email everyone who survived the purge to explain the new privacy policy and remind people where they can opt out of marketing messages. We don't send many of those out, but our sign-up has always been an explicit opt-in to those messages and you've always been able to manage those settings so we won't be asking everyone to reconsent to send them like many businesses have to. 
• The new privacy policy will go through some of the rights you've probably been hearing about from other organisations, like the right to be forgotten, keeping your data up to date etc. We've always processed these things on request anyway, we just have to tell you more about the process now. 
• Note that if you do opt out of the marketing messages, we will still send you service information about events you have signed up for, we need to be able to do that to let you know of any important updates. 

As always, if you do have any queries about your data and how it's handled, then do contact us for more information.