Like the rest of the internet, it seems, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) that comes into effect today has given us a good opportunity to pause and do a comprehensive review of the ways in which Creative Commons collects and uses the personal information of its community. As an organization, our data processing activities are pretty minimal. But given our event planning, fundraising, and other core functions, we do collect and use some data on a regular basis. We have rewritten our privacy policy to make it easier to understand how, when, and why that data collection happens.

The full new policy is here. We have strived to make it simpler and more human-readable, all while ensuring it is as precise and legally robust as possible. (Just like our legal tools!) Substantively, the most significant changes are:

• We rewrote our privacy principles to better reflect the ideals that motivate CC’s current practices.
• We provided a more detailed explanation of our analytics tools and the instances in which the information they gather may be tied to your other personal information.
• We described our retention practices, which reflect CC’s recent effort to begin to streamline and centralize data storage practices internally.
• We added a simple process for you to request to access the data CC holds about you.

Most of CC’s data collection happens when you voluntarily and knowingly provide CC with data, for example, by signing up to join the CC Global Network or donating money to our programs. There are, however, three ways in which CC collects and uses some data indirectly: Google Analytics, fundraising analytics, and email analytics. Our privacy policy describes those processes and how to opt out if you choose to do so.

If you are already on our mailing list, we are not requiring you to opt back in to continue to receive CC email updates. We decided that measure was not necessary given that CC has been consistently strengthening its mailing list sign-up procedures over the years, up to the double opt-in mechanism we use now. As always, you should feel free to update your preferences or unsubscribe entirely at any time by going to this link.

CC will continue to monitor privacy regulations around the world and look for ways to improve our privacy practices.