*Just look at those Stacks scramble.
SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past two months, Google has started letting people around the world choose what data they want to share with its various products, including Gmail and Google Docs.
Amazon recently began improving the data encryption on its cloud storage service and simplified an agreement with customers over how it processes their information.
And on Sunday, Facebook rolled out a new global data privacy center — a single page that allows users to organize who sees their posts and what types of ads they are served.
While these changes are rippling out worldwide, a major reason for these shifts comes from Europe: The tech giants are preparing for a stringent new set of data privacy rules in the region, called the General Data Protection Regulation.
Set to take effect on May 25, the regulations restrict what types of personal data the tech companies can collect, store and use across the 28-member European Union. Among their provisions, the rules enshrine the so-called right to be forgotten into European law so people can ask companies to remove certain online data about them. The rules also require anyone under 16 to obtain parental consent before using popular digital services. If companies do not comply, they could face fines totaling 4 percent of their annual revenue.
With the deadline for the new rules now just a few months away, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have been scrambling to get ready. Facebook and Google have deployed hundreds of people to make sense of the regulations. Many of the companies have overhauled how they give users access to their own privacy settings. Some have redesigned certain products that suck up too much user data. And in some cases, companies have removed products entirely from the European market because they would violate the new privacy rules....
