What You Need to Know About GDPR
The Beginners Guide to GDPR
From social media applications to banks and retailers, all service providers collect consumer data for different purposes. From name, DOB, and credit card numbers to religious beliefs and political inclination, organizations store, collect and analyze all sort of data.
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is a new set of rules to ensure digital privacy and data protection for European citizens. At its core, it aims at ensuring that people can be in control of their personal data and information. These rules are designed to fit with the modern requirements of the digital era to enable businesses and individuals to fully leverage the digital economy without compromising on privacy and consent. GDPR applies to all organization operating within the EU including those who offer goods or services to European citizens regardless of where they operate from. As a result, the implications of GDPR are not limited to European businesses only and extend well beyond.
What type of data is protected under GDPR?
No matter how strong your security perimeter is, data breaches are bound to happen. It’s no longer a matter of why but when. At some point, information stored in securest of environments may fall in the wrong hands. GDPR makes it compulsory for the organizations to get consent from the owners before storing their data and ensure that strictest security measures are taken to protect that data. Failure to implement up-to-date security procedures can land organizations in serious trouble, and they may have to face penalties including heavy fines.
Under GDPR, all sort of personal data such as name, physical address, IP address, RFID tags, cookie data, health information, ethnicity, political opinions and sexual orientation of the EU citizens must be protected.
How much could GDPR penalties cost?
In January, Google faced a €50M fine for failing to comply with the GDPR. The French data protection watchdog, CNIL, claimed that Google did not provide its users with enough information about its data consent policies and also failed to give them enough control over their data usage. Previously, a Portuguese hospital faced a €400,000 fine for two GDPR infringements including irregular access to patient data.
Just recently, a UK watchdog is ready to fine $124M to Marriott International in the wake of a data breach. Out of the 400 million guest record impacted, about 37 million belonged to the EU citizens. Another whopping $230M fine was issued to British Airways earlier this month due to a security incident resulting from poor security arrangements on the behalf of the British Airways.
Making Sure That You’re Prepared in the Age of GDPR
Ensuring security and compliance is not only important for avoiding huge monetary fines, but it’s also equally important of businesses to maintain their reputation. Most of the business processes involve interacting with cunsummer’s data; therefore, GDPR compliance needs to be a part of the overall business strategy.
On your journey towards becoming GDPR compliant, you will need help on both technical and legal fronts. Here are a few requirements that you will need to fulfill in order to ensure compliance:
Clear Terms of Consent
One of the most important things to work on is clear terms of consent. Your terms of consent must be unambiguous and easy to understand. The consumers must also be able to withdraw their consent whenever they want to. Another right that GDPR gives your consumers is the right to request data removal or deletion once the purpose of their data has been fulfilled.
Incident Response Plan
The deadline to report a data breach to impacted customers and any data controllers is within 72 hours of the incident. Failure to do so results in GDPR infringement and heavy fines. Secondly, businesses must have an up-to-date, GDPR compliant incident response plan in place. The ability to quickly detect a breach and mitigate the consequences can considerably reduce the amount of the fine a business may face in the event of a security incident.
Data Mapping
Data mapping is another important part of GDPR compliance. To ensure that data is in compliance at every stage, understanding the complete path of information within the organization is imperative. Documenting how data flows in the company can highlight the areas that may cause problems and allow you to address them in time.
Right to Data Access and Portability
Your customers have a right to ask for a copy of all the data that you have stored about them. They also have a right to know how do you intend to use that data. They can not only request you to delete that data once its purpose has been achieved, but they can also reuse the same data in other circumstances that have nothing to do with your company.
Appointing a Data Protection Officer
Your company may also need to appoint a data protection officer (DPO). Instead of hiring someone new for the position, a company can even designate the position to someone who already has similar work experience. Alternatively, you can hire a remotely working DPO who is working in a similar position for other organizations as well.
Logging Risk Mitigation Progress
Under GDPR, businesses need to keep a record of the risks they have identified in the past, and how they are attempting to eliminate those risks. Companies need to be in a position to demonstarate the progress they’re making in order to further secure the data of their consumers.
Ensuring GDPR compliance may appear to be a daunting task at first, but in the end, the goal is to build an environment where your consumers could trust you and know that their data is in safe hands. And regardless of the data’s location, they are the ones with the ultimate control of their data. Although these regulations require some adjustments on your company’s part, these are necessary for safeguarding consumers’ data rights.
