Protecting Your Data in this Global Age.

By Janis Norton,
Manager of The Urban Farm.

Data breaches have garnered a lot of news over the past few years. In fact for a while there it seemed like there was an announcement of a breach almost weekly. The sad reality is that we run the risk of our personal information being stolen or lost anytime we share it with a business, especially in this globally connected business and financial world.

A matter of integrity and ethics

Personal privacy and data protection have become really important for all businesses that send or collect information over the internet for a variety of reasons. You may have heard of the recent legislation which went into effect for all businesses with customers in the European Union. The measure is called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is design to bring the standards of protection of personal information into a more global and modern status.

This is why you received a slew of emails lately asking for your updates. Frankly, while it is a bit of a headache to set up the process (and probably a bit tiresome for you to respond to the myriad of emails), we believe that your privacy should be protected.

It is the only ethical way to operate, and the way we’ve done things since the beginning.

What is happening online almost everywhere

This whole process started in 2016 when the GDPR was approved, but hit a frenzy when the effective date came due on May 25, 2018. Companies needed to show how data is being collected, and give their customers the opportunity to selectively opt-in, opt-out, or maybe even ‘erase’ their information. This process of documenting customers’ selections is time consuming and involves a lot of effort to set up properly.
Many small companies are having to put in a lot of extra work, and I’m sure most of them did not have the time or expertise to make this change simply or quickly. I know because Tayler (our online courses and evergreen expert) is on extended vacation and we are juggling our tasks to figure out the process here for us. Honestly, until this whole GDPR became big news in May, as small as we were and just doing our thing, we were unaware of the change.

Here at The Urban Farm

Locally, we have a dedicated presence through our Urban Farm Fruit Tree Program and a variety of local education events we hold. However, with the popularity of The Urban Farm Podcast, we have a growing number of listeners and Newsletter subscribers outside of the United States. To do most of what we do online, the only data we collect is first names and email addresses. Addresses are only needed when physical items are going to be shipped or when a credit card is used. We use a secure processing system for those payments and have no access to the actual credit card information.

We track registrations for events, courses, and purchases made, sign-ups for our newsletters and emails series, and of course for purchases made. This tells us what we are doing that is working and if there are topics that we need to continue to focus on. EVEN SO, we consistently strive to protect our subscribers’ contact info. If we are doing a joint project with another group we will only share this basic information when notifying the participants before hand.

Frankly, small online businesses like ours are not the target businesses the regulation is trying to affect, and we don’t collect any sensitive information. So, we will continue to do our part in protecting privacy because it is the way we’ve always operated and it is the right thing to do.

So what does this mean for you?

Your inbox was getting inundated with emails asking you to update your preferences. If you are like me, you probably ignored or deleted quite a few. Well I was doing that until I realized how hard some of these companies worked to set up that process. I understood that value of letting them know what data I was interested in keeping at their business.

Please take the time to choose

I earnestly urge you to take a moment and update your preferences for those businesses you want to support. This is especially important for those businesses that provide information that you rely on or need to continue receiving. I truly hope that The Urban Farm is on this list for you, but even if we are not – do not ignore those important emails for the other valuable businesses in your life. These surveys are usually incredibly simple (I only wish it was that simple to create), and you’ll be done amazingly fast.

Thank you for supporting us this far!
Your Urban Farmer-in-Training Janis!

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