Today is the long-awaited effective date for Europe’s General Data Protection, also known as the GDPR. The GDPR is Europe’s way of pushing back against American tech companies, like Google and Facebook. It’s purpose is to protect the privacy rights of EU citizens.

But many observers believe the law will also give Americans more control over what data is collected about us when we use the internet and – perhaps more importantly – how it’s used.  The reason? Some of the changes that tech companies have made to their data collection practices in order to comply with the GDPR will end up being implemented in the U.S.

The internet’s “grand bargain”  should be no secret by now. Tech companies like Google give us services for “free”, like search and email. In return, we allow them (sort of) to collect sensitive personal information about us. They use that data to profile us and then share the profiles with their real customers – advertisers – who use them to target us with personalized ads.

Trading personal information for “free” services is the tradeoff, at least in theory. But good luck trying to find out who has access to your data. That’s the fallacy behind calling the exchange of personal information for “free” services a tradeoff. You can’t know whether the tradeoff is fair without knowing who has your data and how it’s being used.

Because of the changes required by the GDPR, companies you’ve done business with will be emailing you about changes to their privacy policies. They’re contacting you to ask you to consent to their updated privacy policies. Don’t ignore these notices. Some of them may describe important new privacy controls you can take advantage of. As the New York Times cautions, “if we ignore them, we may be unintentionally giving consent to more of our data being shared than we actually want to give out.”

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