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The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is one of the strictest data privacy laws in the world. 

Its purpose is to protect the privacy of EU citizens and residents by regulating how companies collect, process, and store their personal data. 

GDPR came into effect in 2018, meaning that all organizations targeting EU citizens must comply with this law. 

So, if your company – regardless of where it’s located – is collecting and/or processing the data of EU citizens, your website has to reflect the requirements stipulated by GDPR. 

Since non-compliance penalties are hefty and can be up to 20 million euros or 4% of the company’s annual revenue, it’s best to learn how to avoid them. 

Get Consent From Users  

Transparency is at the core of GDPR, which is why under this law, you’re required to obtain express consent from users for collecting and processing their sensitive data. 

This doesn’t apply to all data types, such as: 

• when you already have a contract with a customer
• when you are legally required to process personal data
• when you belong to any of the exceptions outlined in Art. 23  

In other cases, you need to ask users for consent and make sure it’s informed, specific, and unambiguous.

To achieve this, you need to: 

• Let your users know who you are, why you need their personal information, how you will protect it, and what their rights are; 
• Use a positive opt-in method, that is, avoid pre-checked opt-in boxes;
• Have separate permission requests for each processing activity – you can’t bundle the requests for a demo and newsletter into one request;
• Make it as easy as possible for users to withdraw consent and opt out by making your unsubscribe buttons prominent. 

In addition to this, there are other details you should include, such as how users can reach you and your data protection officer or how long you will keep their data. 

Squeezing all this in your online consent form could tank your conversion rates. To prevent this scenario and stay GDPR compliant, incorporate this information in your Privacy Policy and ask your users to agree and accept it. There are numerous free Privacy Policy templates on the internet, but if you want to play it safe, it’s much better to use an online generator for legal policy documents.

Follow the Privacy by Design Approach 

GDPR requires organizations to protect their users’ personal data through technical and organizational measures or TOMs. 

This refers to the systems, procedures, and controls your organization implements to safeguard the personal data it collects and processes. For example, outlining standard operating procedures, assessing vulnerability risks, setting up firewalls, having data access protocols in place, and performing regular backups are some of the measures. 

But, if you want to mitigate data risks and prevent security breaches, Privacy by Design (PbD) is a must. 

By definition, PbD means “proactively embedding privacy into the design and operation of IT systems, networked infrastructure, and business practices.”  

Simply put, Privacy by Design doesn’t allow for privacy risks to take place. Rather than fixing the issue retroactively, this approach anticipates and prevents it in advance. 

Some of these principles are: 

• Minimize the amount of personal information you’re collecting and ask only for the data you are going to use.
• Don’t keep the data for longer than you need it.
• Pseudonymise and encrypt the data you store.
• Keep the data in safe locations and ensure reasonable security measures. 

Use Safe Coding and Testing Practices 

Although GDPR doesn’t tell you what programming languages and testing tools you should or shouldn’t use, it’s a good idea to put together a list of safe coding practices. 

Start by disabling any potentially unsafe or redundant modules. This particularly refers to third-party libraries and APIs. Conduct an audit to determine whether some modules collect and store unnecessary data or create security vulnerabilities. 

Similarly, you should map where all the personal data comes from and where it is stored, both virtually and physically, as well as who can access it. 

Your testing processes should implement the Privacy by Design principles, meaning that they should identify vulnerabilities and predict the ways in which security breaches could occur. 

The trick is to be creative and try thinking like a hacker. This will allow you to find all the nooks and crannies through which the sensitive data can leak or where it shouldn’t be stored. 

Ask yourself how malicious actors could get unauthorized access, whether they could achieve this by purposefully triggering an error, or how protected your legacy data is. 

Don’t forget to document all your procedures, tools, and methodologies together with the results. 

Wrap Up

Customer information is a crucial asset for growing your business; however, handling it is a huge responsibility. GDPR is tough and challenging to implement, but you should make sure you’re compliant not only because of costly penalties but because of providing the best user experience to your website visitors and customers.