Just weeks ago, the letters G-D-P-R seemed to spell 'd-o-o-m' for any company selling consumer data out the back door.

Which, by the way, was just about every tech company.

But the GDPR, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, isn't quite the panacea for privacy that it appeared.

In some ways, it turned out to be more of a spam-acea.

While the GDPR mandates that companies must have your consent before they do, well, just about whatever they want, with your information, companies have placed that heavy lifting on… you guessed it, you. In practice, you could spend several hours a week, just trying to manage the way that your personal information is used by each site you visit, each brand you like. And, if you wanted to see the cumulative information you have granted to all of those separate systems, you would have to download your information from each and compare that on your own in some way.

This is about as likely as anyone actually reading 'Terms and Conditions'.

So what if you could control all of your data––in seconds? Well, we built technology that allows you to do that.

We've spent the past three years developing JLINC. It is designed to meet people's needs first, and solves data privacy issues in a way that no one else can touch. In fact, JLINC is a new layer of the Internet that is fully interoperable, extensible and can easily integrate into any system.

Our technology is user-centric––built with you, not big business, in mind.

This allows us to simultaneously:

1. Empower you to protect yourself and conveniently make the choices that are best for you.JLINC enables you to manage your data permissions across all brands. Set your preferences once, and apply them everywhere. Or, if you'd like, customize your preferences. The choice is, as we believe it always should be, yours.
2. Give a competitive advantage to the companies that respect you most.JLINC provides marketers with the best possible data from their customers. That's because it's from the most reliable source possible––you, their customer. Trillions of dollars are wasted each year on irrelevant marketing. If customers have the choice to receive all of your marketing emails, or only information on one specific product, and they do opt-in to receive only that, you know they're truly interested in hearing from you.

At JLINC, we believe that the best way to find out what people like isn't to spy on them. It's to ask them.

Here's how JLINC works, in practice.

In as little as 5 minutes, a brand can create an account on JLINC. Then, any user will be able to control their data on that brand's platform and also on any other JLINC enabled platform, by simply toggling a switch on the app.

For individual users, JLINC setup can take less than 3 minutes. Once a user registers, they can choose to apply the same preferences to every brand, or to customize them, for one brand, or for a set of similar companies in seconds.

Like a universal remote control that gives people––not companies––control over their information, JLINC.com is a platform built on the JLINC open protocol. And by the way, solving the messiness of GDPR for both individuals and businesses is only one of its numerous applications.

We invite your thoughts, participation and enthusiasm to share this news. Sign up at jlinc.me to receive a private invitation for JLINC Beta when it goes live.