> The lawyers would disagree with you. If the email address contains anything that identifies you personally, it's PII and thus falls under GDPR. You are simpl

> The lawyers would disagree with you. If the email address contains anything that identifies you personally, it's PII and thus falls under GDPR. You are simply missing the point. It's not required to "contain" anything. If it is the email address of a person, then that makes it PII. > Therefore, if you collect email addresses you have to go through great pains to protect them. Well, yes, of course you do? If you want to profit from using other people's addresses, you better make sure they don't get harmed by it. > We live in a data driven world that requires.... well... collecting data. Erm ... no? We don't live in a data driven world, we live in a world where some people are completely unwilling to respect the boundaries of other people and consider it their right to do whatever it takes to manipulate them in their interest. There is no such right, there is nothing that requires that you violate other people. > Saying "just dont collect email" isn't helpful Well, whether it is helpful depends on what you expect to be helped with. But it is a perfectly viable thing to do. If people voluntarily hand you their email address so you can send them invoices, say, there is absolutely no problem with you doing so, because that obviously means that there is consent. Anything beyond that, and you are just selfishly trying to ignore the interests of other people, and it is perfectly viable to just not do that. > collecting IP address info without associating it with use data is pretty pointless. ... so don't do it, then? > It is a huge, expensive undertaking to make any kind of "legacy" pre-GDPR infrastructure GDPR compliant. Erm, well, it's an expensive undertaking to stop being an asshole ... so what? > If you are doing anything useful on the internet, you are collecting data. So, if I publish a free software project on my own web server that doesn't write any log files ... that's not useful? Could you explain how exactly that reasoning goes?