Analyzing the Influx of Privacy Emails During the Past Few Months

Published May 28th, 2018 by Emily

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With the recent changes regarding GDPR being enacted a lot of emails have been sent in users regarding privacy policy changes. I decided to take a look at all the privacy policy emails I've received and see how the frequency of the last few months stacks up with the past.

When were these emails received?

I got an email address and first started signing up for accounts in late 2011. There has been a steady stream of privacy related emails sent to my inbox since that time.

While GDPR was passed in April 2016, there is no noticeable jump in the number of emails received back then. There's a jump in August 2016, but that is because four services all owned by Microsoft changed their privacy policy in the same week in addition to the regular flow of policy changes.

You can see an extreme jump in the number of emails received in the last few months because GDPR becomes enforceable on May 25th, 2018.. Zooming in on just March 2018 to today, the end of May 2018, you can see the days when most of those emails were sent out.

It seems that most services waited until the last minute to send out those privacy policy change emails. The most number of emails (13) were sent out the day before the policy went into effect, May 24th, 2018.

Who is emailing me?

This also gives me a chance to review some services that I may have forgotten I have an account with.

Interestingly, I don't remember signing up for accounts with almost a third of the services that are emailing me about their privacy policy changes. Thankfully, I do recognize the names of most of names of the companies but there are at least three services that I don't think I've ever used before. Likely this is because services I signed up for long ago were acquired or are owned by companies with a different name.