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Sweeping reforms are set to take charge of European consumers online privacy and data concerns next spring, but the impact could be global and a huge win for consumer privacy advocates. The regulation applies if the companies collecting or storing data are based in the European Union or deal with data of E.U. residents, even if their headquarters are elsewhere.

Passed by the European Union in April 2016, the regulation officially known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or known as PR-speak on Twitter as #GDPRubbish is supposed to give Internet users more control over the ways that their personal information is used.

As the BBC explained, Simply put, organisations need to keep records of all personal data, be able to prove that consent was given, show where the datas going, what its being used for, and how its being protected. If companies dont comply, they could face penalties of 20 million euros or up to 4 percent of annual global turnover (whichever is greater).

The European Parliament shared this breakdown when the regulation passed:

The new rules include provisions on:

The GDPR is scheduled to take effect in May 2018. Were in the middle of the two-year transition period for companies to come into compliance, but one survey found that more than 60 percent of organizations havent even started implementing their new protocols.

As Axios Sara Fischer pointed out, That means everyone from Google to your neighbor who sells shoes on eBay could be affected. Its also not just tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook that are involved, but data-collecting businesses across all sectors including publishers.

However, the tech companies will be leading the way. Were going to see innovative things from Google and Facebook in terms of how they deal with it, David Downing, executive vice president at ASG Technologies, told Axios.

Startups and smaller companies are worried about the regulation being overly burdersome.

We hold millions of datapoints on our users and we already take protecting this very seriously. Our customers trust us with their data on the assumption that we wont leak or lose it, which we dont, Tom Davenport, the CEO of a London technology company with 10 employees, told the Sun. Its fundamentally pretty straightforward. Its frustrating therefore to now be hit with such a massive and complex piece of legislation in this area.

European Union officials say its necessary: This is the kind of price we pay for a civilized way for the flow of personal data in the world, Wojciech Wiewlorowski, assistant supervisor at the European Data Protectionin Brussels, told Axios.

The new law equals bigger fines for getting it wrong but its important to recognize the business benefits of getting data protection right, a spokesperson for the U.K.s government agency in charge of enforcing the GDPR told the BBC.

A coalition to raise awareness of the regulation just launched today in Ireland, with a newsletter highlighting the buzz around the GDPR as its official implementation deadline approaches in May.

While the regulation is grounded in the European Union (and will still apply in the United Kingdom after it exits the group), analysts say the GDPR is a big step in securing consumer data worldwide.

I am optimistic that many of the GDPRs protections will trickle down from the EU to other western nations, wrote Simon Crosby, the cofounder of an global online security company, in a Forbes post. For a large enterprise such as a bank, implementing different controls and procedures for managing privacy for each geography in which it operates is likely to be onerous.

The regulation can be a bit jargon-heavy, which led to the popularity of the #GDPRubbish hashtag. (Weve included some of the more coherent and comprehensive breakdowns as links in this piece.) People have been fact-checking different claims about GDPR on Twitter, though we cant verify that all the tweets on the hashtags are accurate.

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The European Union's new data privacy rules will make companies worldwide clean up their online security, or else - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard