What GDPR Means For Website Owners

GDPR applies to every person or business that has a publicly accessible website and quite simply there is no way around that. These regulations apply to everyone from the massive multinationals to the smallest sole traders, if you have a website then it needs to comply with GDPR.

In essence the GDPR are there to protect the privacy of individuals, to allow them to:

• Ensure their data is collected through and only through their consent
• Easily ascertain and access what information a business has about them
• How and for what purpose that information is being used
• How it is being stored and secured
• And to have “the right to be forgotten”, in other words the ability to have all personal information that pertains to them deleted and destroyed, (except under certain circumstances)

Well this is the €20 Million question… literally!

Failure to comply with GDPR can, in the most extreme cases, be met with fines of up to €20 Million or 4% of global annual turnover, so getting it badly wrong can get pretty expensive. But don’t panic just yet, there will be a process for dealing with non compliance that will allow you the opportunity to correct your procedures prior to fines being issued.

That said it is always best to start off on the right foot. The European Commission has also built a simple website that gives a brief introduction for small businesses, which you can find here: Better Rules for Small Business.

Over the next short while I will be writing some informative blog posts on five actions you can take to at least show that a determined effort has been made to make your site compliant. As I publish them I will make them available below, so be sure to keep checking back to see them, or better still get links to them sent directly to your inbox by signing up to my mailing list.