Photo of Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR

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Dutch text and a diagram.

Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16. The data subj…

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That's not my name! Making sensible decisions when asking for a user's title

· 6 comments · 150 words · read ~278 times.

Email which says "Hi Prefer not to say Eden."

Back in the good old days, when men were real men - and people like you knew their place - the world was simple. There were three titles to choose from: Mr, Mrs, and Miss. Perhaps also Dr if you were feeling fancy. But these fucking millennials with their "Ms" and "Mx" - amirite?!!? Anyway, I was signing up to a service recently which wanted my title. I didn't think they needed a proxy for my gender, marital status, education level, or military rank - so I picked "Prefer not to say".…

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