Business Guide To Understanding & Complying with GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates that businesses need to deal with client’s personal data in a constitutional manner. All of the client’s personal data needs to be completely secure at all times.

Additionally the company must transparently inform the client exactly what information about the client is being secured. The terms and conditions page should be easily understood by a layman.

The GDPR guidelines will be directly applicable to all EU countries beginning May 25, 2018.

Businesses failing to comply with these guidelines may face fines of 4% of the worldwide annual budget for the particular enterprise or monetary fines up to a maximum amount of EUR 20 million. If an organization is guilty of violating the GDPR the higher fine of the two will be imposed.

Which Organizations Will Be Affected By The GDPR?

Commercial organizations operating within the EU region need to comply with the GDPR by May 25, 2018. To understand whether or not your website, organization or corporation will be affected by this regulation, try answering the following questions.

• Does your organization collect personal data to supply goods and services to EU residents?
• Does your company maintain records of personal data of EU residents for example, clients and or staff members for marketing purposes?
• Does your organization handle data of EU residents for the purposes of offering them competitive goods and services?

If you answered yes to any of these questions your organization will definitely be directly affected by the GDPR regardless of the actual physical location of the office. Almost all businesses in the US also have branch offices or representative offices or customers in the EU. This basically means that all businesses operating within the EU region need to comply. Consider taking a self-assessment to determine if the GDPR applies to your organization.

Securing Customer’s Personal Information:

A client or customer cannot be contacted directly for marketing purposes without having established verifiable interest in a certain product or service. No company, website or organization can collect an individual’s personal information without their consent. The customer or client must first consent to sharing their personal information with the company, website or organization. Then the company, website or organization can acquire the personal information of the customer. The client or customer needs to be able to clearly identify which demographic information a company has in their possession. The customer or client should not receive any marketing information or any other communiqué without having administered prior consent to receiving it. Company’s need to maintain transparent records of all the information they have pertaining to their clients and customers. If at any time the customer wants to change any or all of personal information linked to a certain company, the entire process should be straightforward and uncomplicated.

Complications Organizations Face to Effectively Implementing the GDPR:

It is important to understand that companies, websites and organizations operating in the EU union face serious consequences if they fail to comply with the GDPR requirements. At the same time, some of the stipulations will not be easy to implement for companies using legacy or archaic infrastructure. Tracing all the different partners a company shares its information with will be difficult if they do not have easily accessible records. Personally identifiable information (PII) has been extended in the GDPR to include any and all information which can be used to uniquely identify a specific individual. This data could be in the form of a retina scan, fingerprint, banking account information or even IP addresses. It will be difficult and expensive for businesses using obsolete devices to comply with all these requirements.