Admob and the GDPR of DOOM!

[Picao84]

As you all probably already know GDPR is coming up on the 25th of May. Despite the fact that this has been years in the making, Google is still fumbling around with it. A so called Consent SDK was supposed to be made available to Developers, but 5 days from the due date, nothing was released at all.

What is even more ridiculous is that even if it arrives before the 25th May, developers wont be able to test anything before that date!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/android_ad_pause_gdpr_chaos/

Given Google's Consent SDK absence, I started working on my own after deciding that I will not present personalized ads AT ALL after the 25th (the law is very complex and full of shenanigans so I prefer, at least in the beginning, to go with the path of lowest risk). After implementing a Cookies permission dialog (even if ads are not personalized they still store cookies and that comes under GDPR as well), that users have to accept, otherwise the App closes, I went and tried to request non personalized ads. Low and behold, the first ad shown was very much personalized as it was about my upcoming trip to Japan!

Between this and the HUAWEI blunder, what the hell is Google doing? Everyone asleep at the wheel? Terrible.

GDPR will make our lives more miserable it seems, with a blight of permissions for absolutely everything...

 

[BRiT]

I hear if you store any user data and want to be GDPR compliant, its best to use MongoDB ... as its bound to lose the data anyways.

 

[Gubbi]

I hear if you store any user data and want to be GDPR compliant, its best to use MongoDB ... as its bound to lose the data anyways

The biggest problem is not the data in active databases, which is easily deleted. For us, it is the backups that pose the biggest problems. We have daily backups of every database for the past 30 days, the past 12 months and every year since the start of the company (1997). These database dumps are single compressed files per database. When a user demands to have his/her personal data deleted as per the new GDPR rules, we have to delete personal data from these backups as well. So instead of performing a DELETE ... FROM... on a few tables, we have to:

1. For each database dump file (50+)
2. Copy compressed dump file from long term storage to temporary DB machine
3. Decompress and import
4. Delete user data
5. Export modified database and compress
6. Copy new dump to long term storage.

Cheers