A Quick Guide to GDPR (General Data Protection Requirements)

General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is not a new data protection law by any means. It has been active in Europe since 1995 and even the new regulations in GDPR were issued four years ago in 2018. However, if you are new to GDPR, it can be difficult to properly follow and understand its guidelines.

A Quick Guide to General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) might just be what you need in order to introduce yourself and your staff to its guidelines. The guide may also be relevant to you if you are aiming to refresh your knowledge about and adherence to its compliance guidelines.

Organizations need to follow the GDPR privacy law to ensure tha the nature of, amount of, the purpose of collection of, and processing of user data is compliant. It protects European citizens’ confidential data, allowing them to raise complaints even in non-member countries.

GDPR is applied to a company based on specific requirements. First, the organization must be aware that their data is subjected to GDPR privacy laws. Second, the organization must know how GDPR rules affect their data collection and its protection. That is why a Data Protection Officer (DPO) is assigned to each organization to introduce and review compliance procedures.

GDPR has seven core principles to lawfully process personal data. According to these principles, companies can collect, organize, store, alter, use, and destroy personal data. Those principles are:

Lawfulness, Fairness, And Transparency

The first principle of GDPR obligates data collectors to be fair, honest, and candid with people when using their personal data in any form. Additionally, to process data, it should be justified by the law as necessary. If the objective is achievable without intrusive data processing, then GDPR compliance may not be required.

Purpose Limitation

The second principle requires a data collecting company to clearly state its reasons for collecting personal data. These reasons should, in addition to being specified and explicit, be legitimate. The justification must be documented to protect the exploitation of an individual’s confidential information.

Data Minimization

According to GDPR, an individual’s data is processed and stored on a strictly need-to-have basis. Therefore, companies must collect the minimum amount of data to fulfill their purposes. In addition, organizations cannot store incomplete data that is not useful. For example, you cannot store names and email addresses if you don’t have an email ID to approach users from. Storing additional and useless data is against the data protection compliance checklist.

Accuracy

This principle follows key points to ensure organizations are meeting the GDPR’s accuracy compliance criteria.

• Assessment to determine the accuracy of stored data.
• Correction or update of existing, outdated data.
• Destruction or erasure of incorrect, outdated data.

Storage Limitation

GDPR obligates organizations to limit their data storage and delete unused data within a specified period of time. This time period can differ from one company to another, from one data type to another, and from one data processing purpose to another. Therefore, companies are bound to create a policy that states the exact period a company is allowed to store and process someone’s information.

Security

Companies must have a sound security system to protect against data breaches. Europeans suffered from over 14 million record breaches in April of 2022 alone. As cyberattacks are becoming quite common, GDPR compliance requires companies to use an online security system to ensure data integrity and confidentiality. The data protection software should have these features:

• Be an accurate and highly reputable security tool.
• Only allow authorized people to access, copy, share, and delete confidential files.
• Back up all data in a secure cloud to prevent data loss.

Accountability

The last principle of GDPR requires companies to prove that they are complying with all the requirements. This means that companies cannot only state that they understand the rules and regulations but rather have documented proof to back up their claims. Therefore, organizations must create a privacy compliance framework to show their data protection system.

By following these points and creating a good framework, companies can provide maximum data protection to their users. However, if you own a small business, you should identify the need for data protection before creating a framework. If the data collection impacts your users, however, then you must follow GDPR compliance principles.

Conclusion

Business organizations collect online users’ data through elements like website cookies for multiple purposes. However, as management, you must follow GDPR rules to ensure that you are not conducting illicit activities with the collected data.

Therefore, you need to define your data privacy policy and comply with the GDPR rules, principles, and requirements. Even if you know about GDPR requirements, it is better to take legal advice to ensure your company achieves the proper GDPR compliance status.

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Owais takes care of Hackread’s social media from the very first day. At the same time He is pursuing for chartered accountancy and doing part time freelance writing.