What is the GDPR? Europe’s new data privacy and security law includes hundreds of pages’ worth of new requirements for organizations around the world. This GDPR overview will help you understand the law and determine what parts of it apply to you.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the toughest privacy and security law in the world. Though it was drafted and passed by the European Union (EU), it imposes obligations onto organizations anywhere, so long as they target or collect data related to people in the EU. The regulation was put into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR will levy harsh fines against those who violate its privacy and security standards, with penalties reaching into the tens of millions of euros.
With the GDPR, Europe is signaling its firm stance on data privacy and security at a time when more people are entrusting their personal data with cloud services and breaches are a daily occurrence. The regulation itself is large, far-reaching, and fairly light on specifics, making GDPR compliance a daunting prospect, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
If you’ve found this page — “what is the GDPR?” — chances are you’re looking for a crash course. Maybe you haven’t even found the document itself yet (tip: here’s the full regulation). Maybe you don’t have time to read the whole thing. This page is for you. In this article, we try to demystify the GDPR and, we hope, make it less overwhelming for SMEs concerned about GDPR compliance.
The right to privacy is part of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” From this basis, the European Union has sought to ensure the protection of this right through legislation.
As technology progressed and the Internet was invented, the EU recognized the need for modern protections. So in 1995 it passed the European Data Protection Directive, establishing minimum data privacy and security standards, upon which each member state based its own implementing law. But already the Internet was morphing into the data Hoover it is today. In 1994, the first banner ad appeared online. In 2000, a majority of financial institutions offered online banking. In 2006, Facebook opened to the public. In 2011, a Google user sued the company for scanning her emails. Two months after that, Europe’s data protection authority declared the EU needed “a comprehensive approach on personal data protection” and work began to update the 1995 directive.
The GDPR entered into force in 2016 after passing European Parliament, and as of May 25, 2018, all organizations were required to be compliant.
The GDPR defines an array of legal terms at length. Below are some of the most important ones that we refer to in this article:
Data processing — Any action performed on data, whether automated or manual. The examples cited in the text include collecting, recording, organizing, structuring, storing, using, erasing… so basically anything.
Data subject — The person whose data is processed. These are your customers or site visitors.
Data controller — The person who decides why and how personal data will be processed. If you’re an owner or employee in your organization who handles data, this is you.
For the rest of this article, we will briefly explain all the key regulatory points of the GDPR.
The GDPR says data controllers have to be able to demonstrate they are GDPR compliant. And this isn’t something you can do after the fact: If you think you are compliant with the GDPR but can’t show how, then you’re not GDPR compliant. Among the ways you can do this:
Technical measures mean anything from requiring your employees to use two-factor authentication on accounts where personal data are stored to contracting with cloud providers that use end-to-end encryption.
Organizational measures are things like staff trainings, adding a data privacy policy to your employee handbook, or limiting access to personal data to only those employees in your organization who need it.
If you have a data breach, you have 72 hours to tell the data subjects or face penalties. (This notification requirement may be waived if you use technological safeguards, such as encryption, to render data useless to an attacker.)
Suppose, for example, you’re launching a new app for your company. You have to think about what personal data the app could possibly collect from users, then consider ways to minimize the amount of data and how you will secure it with the latest technology.
Article 6 lists the instances in which it’s legal to process person data. Don’t even think about touching somebody’s personal data — don’t collect it, don’t store it, don’t sell it to advertisers — unless you can justify it with one of the following:
Once you’ve determined the lawful basis for your data processing, you need to document this basis and notify the data subject (transparency!). And if you decide later to change your justification, you need to have a good reason, document this reason, and notify the data subject.
You could also choose to designate a DPO even if you aren’t required to. There are benefits to having someone in this role. Their basic tasks involve understanding the GDPR and how it applies to the organization, advising people in the organization about their responsibilities, conducting data protection trainings, conducting audits and monitoring GDPR compliance, and serving as a liaison with regulators.
You are a data controller and/or a data processor. But as a person who uses the Internet, you’re also a data subject. The GDPR recognizes a litany of new privacy rights for data subjects, which aim to give individuals more control over the data they loan to organizations. As an organization, it’s important to understand these rights to ensure you are GDPR compliant.
Below is a rundown of data subjects’ privacy rights:
We’ve just covered all the major points of the GDPR in a little over 2,000 words. The regulation itself (not including the accompanying directives) is 88 pages. If you’re affected by the GDPR, we strongly recommend that someone in your organization reads it and that you consult an attorney to ensure you are GDPR compliant.