You may have heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, which is the new regulatory framework for managing personal data of European Union citizens; it comes into force on 25 May, 2018. Since Percepio is based in Sweden, which is a member of the European Union, and have a lot of customers in the EU we are directly affected by the new regulations. This means we will have to make some changes to how we handle our email lists.

Three simple rules to begin with

This is not the time and place to explain GDPR in detail, but the basic rules it puts in place for email lists are simple enough:

• We (Percepio) must explain what data we collect and why, and how we intend to use it.
• We must be able to show that you have agreed to let us store and process your data, and receive emails from us.
• You have a right to be removed from a list and/or update your subscriber info.

We have had GDPR-compliant signup forms in place for our newsletter since late last year, but if you’ve been with us longer than that we need to ensure that the first two requirements above are met. Therefore you may receive a mail from us, asking you to reconfirm your subscription to the Percepio newsletter.

If you are a Tracealyzer customer, we have additional data about you that has to do with invoicing, license registration and things like that. Handling of this information is also regulated under GDPR, but we do not foresee any immediate changes to our current registration process as we have developed it with GDPR in mind.

Think before gathering data

As a matter of fact, we have been considering GDPR even when developing Tracealyzer 4. There are little bits and pieces of the application that work the way they do because we knew the new rules were coming – one such example is the Feedback icon in the upper right corner.

You can use Feedback dialogue as a convenient way to send us a bug report from within Tracealyzer; since Tracealyzer knows which trace you are working with, which views you have open et cetera it can automatically include this info in the bug report, making life easier for us as well. But as you can see from the screen shot, there is at least one piece of information that it does not include, even though it would be helpful for us: your license key. Because if the license key was included, we could correlate the bug report with our registration info and identify you, turning this innocent-looking dialogue into GDPR-regulated personal data.

(Obviously, it is impossible for us to respond to a completely anonymous bug report. That’s why we also ask you to type in your email address if you want a response.)

Percepio’s Privacy policy describes in more detail what personal data we collect, what we do with it and maybe most important what we promise to not do with it.

For more information regarding Percepio, please contact Glenn Moloney at Indes IDS.

27-04-2018