Can someone please help me with this GDPR request email?
Hello guys,
Today I received an email like this “....please send me a GDPR information about all my data you have assigned to this email…..”
Background story: I recently launched one of my side projects https://www.asynctrace.com and I’m trying to reach a developer who might be interested. I didn’t run any email marketing campaign, I just tried to make individual communication. The email contains typical sales pitch nothing personal information.
I don’t have much knowledge of GDPR! Now, what should I reply to this email? Literally I didn’t store any information, I just found the email address and name in GitHub that's all. Also, I don't have any privacy page on my site.
Thanks
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand under GDPR if someone has signed up to your service and they contact you wanting all data you have on them, you have to provide an export of all the data in your database for that user and send it to them.
It doesn't sound like this is the case here, you just got their email from somewhere and used it as a cold email for marketing your product. I think your probably OK just to go back to them and say you don't have any data on them, you just got their from X, Y and Z and thought you might be interested in my product. If not I won't contact you again.
Thank you Chris, I'm a little worried about does it (cold marketing email) violate any GDPR clause otherwise I can get back to them similar to what you said.
As I said I'm not a lawyer or get any direct dealings with GDPR specific stuff its just from what I've read so don't want to give you bad advice :), but my understanding is you haven't broken GDPR by cold emailing someone. GDPR is about how you store and process personal data, i.e. if they signed up and your holding their data in your database for your service.
This Quora article seems to agree - although its not an official article: https://www.quora.com/Will-GDPR-affect-cold-emailing
Hey Chris, how do you guys run email campaign or send cold-marketing email, it feels I'm wasting a lot of time thinking other stuff :( is their any tool or template that I can use for?
I've not done an email campaign myself yet and haven't sent any old cold emails yet either. Had trouble finding the right sort of person to contact so I've got as a far as how to actually go about doing it yet unfortunately.
It is really hard to find an exact match, I send a couple of exact match email but still no luck and send some email asking technical contacts. I've very little idea about marketing :(
Yea same unfortunately I guess its a tricky thing to master otherwise everybody be doing it :)
That means I should get back to them with the explanation of
Why I collect the email address or why I email them and what is the intention of storing data( this is also not valid for me because I didn't store any data). Since I didn't run any campaign so no opt-out option.If your storing their data yes. Like if they create an account for your service, or your just building an email launch with their name and email address ready for when you launch. If its mailing list for when you launch then go back to them saying something like "I/we collected your email when you signed up to let you know about our launch of xyz. We have the following details for you (list what details you have, email, name etc) We will let you know when its ready. If you prefer not to be notified we can remove all details we have of you from our mailing list.
If they actually signed to an existing service, you can say something like "we collected xyz when you created your account for abc. We use this information to provide the service and for xyz purposes. You can delete your account and all associated data by going to (provide a link).
If you just got their email from their a public domain (e.g. Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn) then it doesn't come under GDPR. You can just say something like "I haven't stored any information about you, I just retrieved your email from LinkedIn and thought I'd reach out"
Perfect, your last paragraph explained my case well. I collect their email address from the public domain, which is visible to everyone and I didn't store anything. Thanks Chris, you helped me a lot :)
No problem. Glad to help :)