Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you'll have noticed the barrage of emails from companies notifying you of changes to their privacy policy and terms of service. That's no coincidence, of course: on Friday, May 25, a sweeping new legislation, which deals with data privacy and how companies handle an individual's personal data, will go into effect in the European Union. The regulation, called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short, grants individuals a series of rights concerning their personal data, and stipulates a number of duties companies have regarding how that data is processed.