On the Evozon blog there's a post that provides "a brief reality check to developers about GDPR" and how it effects them and their applications. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a regulation passed in Europe that enforces certain requirements about personal data and how it should be handled.

If you`re reading this, it means you`ve already heard about it or you`re about to receive some flash-news: there`s a new all-encompassing data privacy regulation in the EU. Ready or not, 25th of May 2018, the date when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes effective, will wait for nobody. If there’s any buzz around it, it`s because of a good reason: businesses will have to comply, software will have to evolve.

While there is still some uncertainty around certain parts, the article goes through some things you can do to help you prepare and make your application compliant including:

• discovering and documenting the purpose of the data that is being collected
• providing clear notification of data collection for the user
• define retention periods and deletion policies
• tracing any changes that happen with the data

The article does a good job providing a "checklist" of sorts you can use to ensure you're compliant. Of course, it's by no means an actual method of compliance but it does provide a good list to guide you in the right direction.