Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any sympathy for business who were complying with the letter of the law while finding any excuse they could to subvert the spirit of the law. Neither do I. It's the organisations who were complying with the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and generally accepted good practices at the time and still won't be compliant under GDPR that I'm worried about. As a concrete example, every single charity…
It's interesting that you mention charities, because as we know in the UK many of them were breaking the law and there has been considerable regulatory action to bring them back into compliance with the existing PECR and DPA. The fact that they're all contacting people saying "We need to re-gain permission under GDPR" just means that a bunch of organisations were, and still are, clueless about data protection. This,…
As someone supporting these charities and whose personal data is being used to send the updates on what they're doing, I (and others in a similar position) am the person who is supposedly being exploited undesirably and in need of protection here. And yet, as I wrote before, I was quite clear about what I was expecting to happen when I filled in each form, and none of the charities I deal with regularly has ever done anything I would consider abusive or beyond what I knowingly agreed to. I really would prefer it if they didn't have to waste their resources on this and instead spent them on whatever good work they would normally do, but since every single one of them has contacted me anyway, I have to assume that something about the GDPR-related changes is preventing that from happening.