This May, a sweeping new data protection law will go into effect across Europe that will change the way tech companies do business anywhere on the continent. It’s called the General Data Protection Regulation, and it is designed to unify all the different privacy policies maintained by European Union states into a single set of rules.

In a way, the regulation approved two years ago is a welcome move: hyper-local data protection laws threatened to carve Europe up into a series of data silos, all with different rules, and the complexity of complying with all those laws would have been prohibitively expensive for cloud startups (and big companies) operating in Europe. Still, the GDPR sets strict new expectations for data handling and carries stiff fines for companies that violate those regulations.

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