Why a GDPR compliant Site is Crucial these Days? If you want to expand your business and want customers and business from across the globe then you must enable GDPR Compliance in your website
By Mitul Patel
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After the Facebook scandal, GDPR become more prominent. GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation was finally enforced on 25th May 2018 by the European Law to protect the privacy and information of their citizens. Along with EU, even UK was part of this. Which means any website, or company that holds any kind of information of the EU & UK citizens cannot use it for their benefit. They are not allowed to share the data with anyone without the user's consent. It is a new legislation in the data protection act and organizations need to have a GDPR compliant website.
This is not a directive but a regulation that has to be followed. Be aware if you think you can surpass this law then you are making a huge mistake. There is a heavy fine of 20 million Euros or 4% of your global turnover whichever is greater. Today, GDPR is going to have an impact on more than one website. The fine could be detrimental to your firm. You could also be fine 2% of the global revenue or 10 million Euros whichever is greater if you don't maintain the records, don not informing the EU user or resident of any data breach. So, it is very important that you change your privacy policies and ensure that your site is GDPR Compliant?
E-commerce site, business sites, mobile apps and a lot more businesses collect the customer data which is later used for any marketing purposes. To ensure that such things don't happen the European government decided to enforce this law to protect the privacy & integrity of their people.
#6 Ways one can ensure to have a GDPR Compliant Website
GDPR has become very important for every business that has a way to collect customer information. Collecting information and using it for other things or promotions without the customer's permission is not possible anymore. You need to take the consent of the customers. Let's take a closer look at the possible 6 ways to make your site GDPR compliant.
Add Cookie Pop-up in the website
You must have noticed that when you visit some site there is pop-up that asks your permission to proceed with collecting your data. If you wish for them collect the data you can click in allow/yes or don't allow/no. These are Cookie pop-ups. After the GDPR law being enforced, it is important that you add this cookie pop-up. There are some already ready tools which are specially designed for GDPR like Cookie Consent that you can implement easily on your website.
Consent For Marketing Activities
This means you need to ensure that every data you collect on your website must have the explicit consent of the user to be used for marketing activities. Using data without consent will be violating the law and leading to heavy fines. So in the form itself, there must be a section that asks them to click on the box to use the data for marketing purpose. This will build trust and it cannot be checked automatically, so there if the customer does not click their data will never be used.
Change Your Privacy Policy
Your privacy policy must be changed keeping in mind the GDPR rules. Have your legal team sit and create a new one that will match the rules of GDPR.
Security
As per the GDPR law you must have your site protected in such a way that no one can use the data stored there. There must be access and encryption security that does not allow data breach and if anyone hacks your site there must be a way to catch the hacker and inform the customer of the same. Don't do the same mistake as Facebook; keep your customers informed of their data being robbed.
Ready Plan for Data Breach
As per GDPR one has 72 hours in hand to inform when a data has been hacked on your website. You should have a system in place that lets you know immediately when your site is hacked and data has been leaked, because you will need to inform the users and find a way to stop it immediately.
Review & Accept Data Retention terms
Recently Google released a Data Retention terms of service in response to the new law on GDPR. You must accept these terms of service so that you know about the changes Google's has made or is planning to make based on the GDPR legislation. This is not a directive hence everyone has to follow it strictly.