General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The General Data Protection Regulation is legislation that applies to all companies who collect, store, and process any data belonging to the European Union. It directs the transfer of private data outside the EU and EEA areas. It is a new regulation that gives the citizens of the EU greater authority over private data and support that their information is being securely protected over Europe. Whether you are a five-person business or have 500 person companies your business has to be GDPR compliant

What is the idea of the General Data Protection Regulation?

The main purpose of GDPR is to establish standardized protection laws for all member countries across the European Union. It develops privacy and builds data rights for EU residents.

Benefits of General Data Protection Regulation

Improved Consumer Confidence

GDPR compliance will demonstrate to customers that your organization is a good guardian of data. This new legislation mandates that each company should have a data protection officer (DPO), along with routine audits of data processing actions. Moreover, your organization will have to comply with a collection of data protection principles under the GDPR, assuring that the required framework is in place to ensure information safety.

Better Data Security

Cyber security breaches loom as a big threat to enterprises in the UK, with 68% of large firms in the UK have encountered a cyber-attack, according to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2017. With the scale and refinement of these initiatives growing each day, having a GDPR-compliant structure in place will lengthen your cyber security systems. The GDPR mandates handling exempt and identity access administration to give only a few professional accesses to important data in your organization, thereby guaranteeing that data does not go into the wrong hands. Additionally, under the GDPR, your organization will have to reveal any breach within 72 hours of its occurrence. GDPR compliance lays the foundation for advanced data security.

Reduced Maintenance Costs

Complying with the GDPR can strengthen your business cut costs by serving you to withdraw any data record software and legacy applications that are no longer suitable to your company. By grasping the GDPR’s mandate to keep your data inventory up-to-date, you can significantly decrease the cost of collecting data by solidifying information that is present in silos or deposited in incompatible formats.

Your organization will also be cleared of data maintenance costs, which otherwise would have been acquired in the form of man-hours and infrastructure maintenance. Another cost-benefit of the GDPR is that your business will be able to more productively involve customers. The communication will be more personalized because of the granularity of the knowledge obtained, thus saving you the sunk cost of attempting detached consumers.

Better Alignment With Evolving Technology

As addition of GDPR compliance, your organization will have to move towards developing its system, endpoint, and application security. Moving towards the most advanced technologies virtualization, cloud computing, BYOD, and The Internet of Things (IoT) it can assist two directions. One giving you a way to more capably handle the expanding demand for data and two, enabling you to allow end-users augmented products, services, and processes.

Greater Decision Making

Under the GDPR, companies can no longer make automatic judgments based on an individual’s personal data. After all, automated conclusions, such as deciding whether or not to procure insurance or a loan to a customer, can likely lead to error. The GDPR mandates the authority to achieve human intervention, thereby restricting room for arbitrary decisions.

What do GDPR data subject rights include?

  • Right to be forgotten -Data subjects can request personally identifiable data to be canceled from a company’s storage. The company has the freedom to decline requests if they can favorably illustrate the legal basis for their rejection.
  • Right of access – Data subjects can examine the data that industry has saved about them.
  • Right to object – Data subjects can deny approval for a company to use or process the subject’s secret data. The company can neglect the opposition, if they can provide one of the legal requirements for preparing the subject’s personal data, but must inform the subject and describe their reasoning behind doing so.
  • Right to rectification – Data subjects can assume incorrect personal information to be changed.
  • Right of portability – Data subjects can obtain the personal data that a company has about them and transfer it.

Requirements of GDPR

  • Lawful, fair, and transparent processing
  • Limitation of purpose, data, and storage
  • Data subject rights
  • Consent
  • Personal data breaches
  • Privacy by design
  • Data protection impact assessment
  • Data transfers
  • Data protection officer
  • Awareness and training

To conclude, there are a significant number of requirements that relate to EU GDPR. It is necessary to understand these conditions, and their suggestions for your company, and perform them within the context of your company. Such implementation would need a dedicated effort, like that of running a project.

Necessary documents and records required by EU GDPR

Here are the documents that you must have if you want to be fully GDPR complaint:

  • Personal Data Protection Policy: This is a top-level document for maintaining privacy in your business, which describes what you want to accomplish and how.
  • Privacy Notice: This document explains in simple words how you will process personal data of your customers, website visitors, and others.
  • Employee Privacy Notice: Describes how your company is going to prepare private data of your employees (which could involve health records, criminal records, etc).
  • Data Retention Policy: explains the process of selecting how long an appropriate type of personal data will be stored, and how it will be securely erased.
  • Data Retention Schedule: Outlines all of your data and explains how long each type of data will be stored.
  • Data Subject Consent Form: This is the most common way to obtain consent from a data subject to process his/her personal data.
  • Parental Consent Form: If the data subject is below the age of 16 years, then a parent needs to provide consent for processing personal data.
  • DPIA Register: This is where you will record all the results from your data protection impact assessment (DPIA).
  • Supplier Data Processing Agreement: You need this document to regulate data protection with a processor or any other supplier.
  • Data Breach Response and Notification Procedure: It describes what to do before, during, after a data breach.
  • Data Breach Register: This is where you record all of your data breaches.
  • Data Breach Notification Form to the Supervisory Authority: In case you have a data breach, you will be required to inform the supervisory power formally.
  • Data Breach Notification Form to Data Subjects: Again, in case of a data breach, you will have the unpleasant duty to notify data subjects formally.

How to get Data Processing Agreement

The drafting of the agreement would commence from the required information shared by you. Once the information is shared, we would assign it to the lawyers who would be working on the document and they shall get in touch with you through mobile and email. The charges paid by you are inclusive of the following

  • First draft in 3-4 working days.
  • Two iterations followed by the First Draft at your convenience.

Requirement Of Privacy Policy

If it’s a startup, then the following information is required:

  • Is registration mandatory can Facebook or Google Plus accounts be linked?
  • Nature of Data collected from users
  • The scope of services provided by you
  • Whether you wish to employ Cookies? What about Google Ads/analytics?
  • Whether you wish to use Third Party payment gateways for any services on your site?

Author: Kousika MV