Forbes | June 12, 2018

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) zero-hour has finally arrived — enforcement started May 25, 2018. Like students cramming for a midterm, I witnessed a flurry of activity from U.S. businesses since the deadline forced people to pay attention, knuckle down and study.

When students cram for a test, they take any shortcuts they can, and that can make for predictable errors, especially any time there is a mentally comfortable answer that happens to be wrong. Psychologists even have a term for this — they call it “availability bias.” In a nutshell, this is our built-in tendency to assume something is right when it’s easy to recall or that it’s wrong just because it’s harder to remember.