GDPR Website Guidance
About GDPR
You may already be aware of the new legislation which came into effect on 25th May 2018 which strengthens the rights of individuals with regards to the collection and use of their personal data. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an important regulation which relates to the collection and use of personal data. This new legislation will impact any organisation that operates within the EU. All businesses and organisations which control and process EU citizen data will need to become GDPR compliant or risk a substantial fine.
In essence, the GDPR regulations relate to how companies collect, store and use personal information. This may be a name, email or postal address or even an IP address - basically any information which may identify an individual. You will need to comply with the GDPR legislation if you handle any personal information relating to an individual.
How This Might Affect Your Website
Forms
SSL
Cookies
Privacy Policy
The new regulation will impact websites which collect personal data and which use cookies and web forms. So if your website has for example a contact form or any other type of forms that take personal information, an email sign-up (for newsletters, blogs etc) and/or user registration you will need to make changes to these in order to comply with the legislation.
Under this new regulation you must now obtain explicit consent from individuals to hold personal information (such as email adresses) and you must give them separate options of how they wish to be contacted (email, phone etc).
You must provide a privacy policy on your web site and this privacy policy must set out clearly what information you collect, what you use it for, how long you retain that information and whether you pass this information along to third parties.
You should employ the use of cookies on your site and and you should make it clear what information you collect and why and give users the option of declining cookie use.
Finally you must make it easy for individuals to opt out at any time and have you remove any information you hold on them.
The Information Commissioner has a comprehensive set of resources we highly recommend for further information.
How We Can Help
We cannot give actual legal advice on GDPR but we can help guide you and implement suggestions to make your website GDPR compliant.
We can assess your website and make suggestions to help you comply with the new regulations. Possible suggestions might include employing the use of cookies and allowing the option of declining cookie use, obtaining a security certificate for your site, making changes to forms to ensure explicit consent is obtained, helping you prepare a privacy policy and updating your terms and conditions to reflect new GDPR regulations..
We can help you to draw up a privacy policy or you can write one yourself. You can find out more information on the ICO website.
Please note that the new GDPR legislation relates to your entire business not just your website and we would recommend that you look at how you collect, store and use personal data across your organisation as a whole.
Ask us for help
If you would like to speak to us about making sure your website is GDPR-compliant then we would be only too happy to talk to you, whether you are an existing client or not.
I want to know more first
Use the following links to find out more first: