The looming May deadline for GDPR compliance may be keeping data protection officers up at night, but a crowdsourced GDPR streaming music playlist aims to provide a soundtrack for the heady days of mass scrambling to come.
Donorfy, a cloud-based fundraising CRM and donor management platform, has released the GDPR-themed playlist on the Spotify site, with the aim of “reminding data protection officers of their requirements.”
The resulting list is a thing of beauty. Think ultra-literal titles like Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepson, Hanging on the Telephone by Blondie and Return to Sender by Elvis Presley, along with nods to privacy and surveillance (natch), like Knowing Me, Knowing You, by ABBA (yes!!), A Little Respect, by Aretha Franklin (though I doubt the Queen of Soul was considering how her psychometric profile would be used when she penned that grand feminist anthem) and the ultimate stalker favorite, the Police’s Every Breath You Take.
The latter did make us think that Weird Al has a beautiful opportunity here for a GDPR-themed album of his own: “Every meme you make, every quiz you take, I’ll be watching you...”
A few low-hanging fruits are oddly missing, like I Always Feel Like (Someone is Watching Me), by Rockwell and Hall & Oates’ Private Eyes (“They’re watchin’ you, watchin’ you”). Perhaps that’s just taking it too far? Nah – let’s take it too far!
The playlist also contains songs such as Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, and Complicated by Avril Lavigne, which Donorfy said “reflect the stresses experienced by many as the deadline approaches.”
Basking in such beautifully topical fare (also included: Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds or You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) by the Beatles) may not help alleviate the headaches or the stress (to recap: A breach of GDPR can result in fines up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is greater). However, it does inject a little levity into the proceedings.
We hope this inspires a rash of GDPR playlists, actually, and maybe a compilation album down the road. Maybe the proceeds can go to helping under-resourced firms achieve and stay in compliance – not to get too Live Aid about it. The possibilities of the power of music are endless, after all.
As for Donorfy, its goals are less lofty.
“We know that database managers everywhere are focused on the GDPR deadline, so we thought this playlist would help them as they go about their re-permissioning campaigns and updating their data protection policies,” said Robin Fisk, founder of Donorfy.
And so it shall, Robin. So it shall.