How to find out what data companies have on you?
Exercise your Right of Access, which allows you to ask a company to provide all the data that they collect on you, and they must do it no matter if it’s your favorite phone game or huge enterprises like Google or Facebook — you can access the data.
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Highlights of important points!
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❎no clear process defined — technically the request can be done verbally or in writing, it can be sent to any employee of the company, and yet the request must be fulfilled. It is recommended to establish internal processes to address requests in a generic way: e.g., define where to send a request (email or a form on the web page), determine the means of verification (sometimes an email is enough, in other times it is possible to ask additional information like the last login date or the last transaction date).
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⏳the time of the reply — as usual, it should take no more than 30 days to fulfill the request. But in some cases this period might be exceeded, in case your request has some nontrivial specific requirements.
. 💸 the price — GDPR allows companies to set a “reasonable administrative fee” in case the request was extensive or it has some nontrivial specific requirements. But in general, it is always free, and our team has never faced any charges.
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Why should you try to exercise this right? Well, it is important to understand the amount of the data that you give away — it will make you more aware of your privacy, and it even might answer some of your questions. The main problem is that in many cases in order to get your data you need to read the privacy policy — a long boring document where it is said how to do it. BUT! We already did some of the research for you, so if you want to get your data from a company — check out our Knowledge Base (https://udaptor.io/explore/) — there you can find simple instructions on how to get your data from a wide range of the companies.
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Have you ever requested your data from companies? Was it easy or hard? Did you find anything interesting, scary, or amusing there? Let us know in the comments!
