Many companies, acting based on poor legal advice, a fear of fines of up to €20m and a lack of good examples to follow, have taken what they see as the safest option for hewing to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): asking customers to renew their consent for marketing communications and data processing. This Guardian’s article talks about the recent explosion of GDPR emails: “many of those requests would be needless paperwork, and some that were not would be illegal“