In what appears to be panic mode, thousands of companies are pinging mailing lists to get affirmative opt-in consent from data subjects, ostensibly to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. In particular, companies that don’t have clear documentation about how they acquired consent in the first place — perhaps they inherited or bought their mailing list — are asking users to click the all-important “I agree” button. But this “re-consent everyone” approach could be overkill, and according to Hogan Lovells Partner Eduardo Ustaran, CIPP/E, “This is an unfortunate mistake that is propagating all over our mailboxes as a direct consequence of the GDPR panic.” In this article for The Privacy Advisor, Jennifer Baker has more on the confusion over consent.
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