Digital publishers rely on a lot of other companies’ technology, which can make it hard to comply with the impending General Data Protection Regulation. Google has been the highest-profile example of this dilemma. But WordPress offers another illustration.
WordPress claims to power 30 percent of the internet, but it’s not only WordPress parent company Automattic’s technology that supports those sites. Through the open source version of WordPress, sites can use more than 55,000 plug-ins created by other companies and developers to provide features that a site needs, like forms for soliciting people’s contact information. But these plug-ins may compromise a site’s ability to abide by GDPR when the law takes effect on May 25.
Ad tech firm Sovrn has developed several WordPress plug-ins that sites can use to do things like show related articles on their pages. To ensure those plug-ins don’t make sites vulnerable to violating GDPR and that the sites don’t disable its plug-ins for fear of violating GDPR, the firm is turning off data collection from users in Europe, said Jack Downey, who leads market development at Sovrn and is VP of its Sovrn Labs division.
Read the whole article here: WordPress Poses Another GDPR Compliance Headache for Publishers
Source: Digiday
Article length: 615 words
Reading time: less than 4 minutes
