EU GDPR stands for European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. This is a new law to protect European residents across the globe, and affects you no matter where your business is located as long as you collect, store and/or process European residents’ personal data.
The personal data is anything that can identify a person either on its own or combined with other data. Her are the examples:
- Name
- Email Address
- Postal Address
- PO BOX Address
- Phone Number
- IP Address (yes, IP Address)
Most of our clients collect personal data through an e-commerce facility for customers that live in Australia, but what about a visitor from the EU that just browses the site? We still collect their IP address somewhere on the server (raw visitor log). This means you need to care about GDPR.
WordPress recently released version ‘4.9.6 – Privacy and Maintenance Release‘, to deal with GDPR and it covers 3 things:
- Comments
There is a new checkbox on the comment system to choose whether their name, email and website are saved in a cookie on their browser - Privacy Policy Page
WordPress now pushes you to create a Privacy Policy Page using their generator. You can access it from Setting > Privacy. This is a WordPress suggestion for your privacy policy content, you may need to edit it to suit your exact business requirements. - Data Handling
The main thing with GDPR compliance is transparency about how you collect, use and share personal data. WordPress has built two features to deal with it: Data Export and Data Erasure which you can access from Tools Page.
While the EU GDPR is a European regulation we need to prepare for if/when our government adopts it in near future. I think the first step for Australians is to update privacy policy pages using the recommendation from WordPress as a start and edit it to suit your business.
The penalties for non-compliance are BIG. Organizations can be fined up to 4% of their annual global turnover for breaching GDPF or €20 Million. It’s better to be safe than sorry. You can learn more about this new law here.
If you need help with anything WordPress, give us a shout!
Disclaimer. This post is not legal advice. Please discuss with a lawyer to suit your specific needs.
