You may have heard of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union data protection law that went into effect on May 25, 2018. Its purpose is to harmonize data protection laws across the EU, give people in the EU enhanced rights to their data, and require businesses to meet certain technical and organizational controls around their collection and processing of personal information.
Meetup has made changes in line with these new standards that we will roll out to members globally.
Meetup's commitment to privacy and data security
Meetup remains committed to protecting our members’ privacy and data security. As part of that commitment, we’ve updated our Privacy Policy effective May 25, 2018, for all members globally. These changes provide:
- Details on how we use your information, such as your location and other platform activity, and the choices and controls available to you.
- Responsibilities for businesses that process personal information, such as asking consent for marketing communications.
- Opportunities to request more information about the data we store, or to modify it.
One of the important ways that Meetup respects our members’ privacy is by offering options for whether a group is Public or Private. In a Private group, some information is hidden from search engines and other members. In response to the GDPR, we’re adding a clear privacy label to group information, and making sure members are informed if a group that they belong to changes its privacy status.
We’re taking other steps to be more transparent. For example, we have updated our privacy policy to detail how and why we collect some data, and we will be implementing additional platform notices and articles to remind our members of this.