Philip Rosedale Announces High Fidelity Changes to Comply With EU's New Data Privacy Rules

High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just sent me over more specifics on the social VR platform's changes to adhere to the GDPR data privacy rules -- including plans to help third party developers connecting their own servers to the network.

"[W]e think that the GDPR is great," Philip tells me, "and sets the right framework that really should be used by all services worldwide (not just the EU): 1. People's identity information as well as usage data is their own property and should be under their clear control. 2. Companies should never unnecessarily collect or store data in a way that could be harmful to people in the case of a breach."

 

In particular terms, that means these changes:  

 

"Updating our privacy policy and Terms of Service to specifically enumerate exactly what data we store and/or log. So things like e-mail address, or IP addresses in the case of logs, or usage info that helps us find crashes (which you can opt out of already). [We're a]dding a process allowing people to request erasure of their data. [And m]aking various registrations and signing up for the appropriate EU services we need for GDPR. "

 

I imagine we'll see similar changes to other social VR worlds which want to avoid heavy fines, many of which are probably playing catch-up: 

"[O]nly seven percent of businesses report being in compliance with the GDPR, and 28% have not even begun to work toward the May 25 deadline. Non-EU companies can't relax either—fines for non-compliance are stiff and any service offered to an EU resident, regardless of whether the service is free and which country hosts its servers, has to play by the rules."

 Speaking of which, here's Philip on how High Fidelity is helping third party companies connected to its network comply with the GDPR too:

"Regarding third-party developers who are using our servers, we will add some docs to help server operators understand exactly what customer data is stored on their servers.  This is a short list - basically a High Fidelity server is similar to a web server in that it can see things like IP addresses of people accessing it, and sometimes (if the server is set to require login) it can see the account names of users.  HiFi servers don't collect or store any other identifying information.  They can certainly be used by operators in a way that complies with GDPR."

 

If you're a third party developer or company serving the virtual world, now is a really good time to check your compliance with the real world regulations about to go into effect.

Comments

[VirusAndroid]

Ohh! Is a good thing about all.

I hope a introducing new rules that help to user and not a hacker.

¡Greetings!