I’ll Never Go Back to Life Before GDPR
The EU’s new privacy laws aren’t perfect, but they do give you a good glimpse into the surveillance economy
As a writer covering the American software industry from inside the European Union, my work puts me in a unique position. Every day when I look at the internet, I switch between seeing it from the point of view of someone in the U.S. and someone in Europe. Since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018, there’s no way I’m ever going back to looking at the internet exclusively as an American.
I’ve been living and working as an American abroad since 2015. Most of my work is for a predominantly American audience, published by American companies. That means I need access to American-centric information, like apps that are only available in the U.S. market and software prices in dollars. So I often use a VPN to make it look like my IP address is inside the United States when I’m using the internet.
Living in the EU, however, I also have to use the internet as a local all the time. When I need to pay my phone bill or order pizza for delivery, my devices must use a local IP address. As a result, I’m constantly switching between these two views of the internet. The European one has made me so much more aware of just how many…
