Today is Data Privacy Day! A good day to remind our readers about GDPR data privacy regulations and those pesky goalposts.

If you haven’t been keeping up, the GDPR hammer is coming down hard and fast on tech giants like Google, who was recently hit with a fine totaling 50 million Euros (about $57,192,500) by France’s data protection regulator CNIL. Anyone familiar with Google’s omnipresence in the digital arena and $111 billion in earnings will immediately notice that the fine, while large, is a softball in comparison with the data protection’s capacity to impose mind boggling fines – up to 4% of global annual revenue.

This is the largest fine levied in support of the new regulation which ‘moves the goalposts’ for data regulation in the European Union, but it is certainly not the only one. Everyone must play by the rules, or risk paying massive fines. GDPR requires global organizations to strengthen the way they process and safeguard the personal data of EU citizens – no exceptions.

The regulation’s Article 17 Right to Erasure is posing the greatest challenge and risk. It presents the greatest risk of compliance failures since current 360-degree Single Customer View CRM, Customer Data Integration (CDI), Master Customer Information File (MCIF) and Master Data Management (MDM) hubs are intentionally skewed for high False-Negative match error rates (records not matched that are actually the same person).

Melissa wants to make sure you avoid draconian fines and heavy-handed enforcement by helping you find – and eliminate if need be – all your EU customers with MatchUP. This service combines Melissa’s deep domain knowledge of contact data with 20+ fuzzy matching algorithms and/or our predefined matchcode to match hard-to-detect records and quickly dedupe your database.

To learn more about MatchUp and how was can help you avoid costly GDPR fines, call 1-800-MELISSA or visit i.melissa.com/giblog-gdpr-matchup-012819.