General Context
Already in the early 90’s, the European Union adopted the Data Protection Directive which regulated the processing of personal data within the European Union. The directive helped European citizens to be aware of their right to privacy, but the effect on the personal data itself was small. Partially because of the different interpretations of the directive by the individual member states.
With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new and modernised law will become enforceable on the 25th of May 2018. The regulation wants organisations (companies, governments, NGO’s, …) to get a mindset of “Data protection by design”. And this not only for European organisations, but all organisations that handle personal data from a European citizen. Even if the organisation is located outside of the EU.
What is a Data Register?
With the WP-GDPR Core plugin and its add-ons, you have to tools at hand to process personal data and let your visitors manage that data themselves. We’re working on improving the process and explaining more on how the plugin works, so it will be easier for new users to get started with the WP-GDPR plugin. This will also help with changing the mindset of personal data.
Apart from managing personal data, it’s also very important to keep track of what happens to the personal data. Basically a history of all things related to the data. This includes:
- When did someone consent to storing the data?
- What data can we store and for how long?
- Who requested access?
- Who filed a delete request?
This “Record of processing activities” (Reference: Article 30 of GDPR) is often called the Data Register and must be available for consultation when privacy authorities ask for it. The Data Register let you keep track on who does what with personal data.
Data Register template
In many cases, creating a Data Register isn’t that hard and can be a good second step (First Step: Identifying all personal data) in getting GDPR compliant. To help you get a grip on the whole Data Register, we make a spreadsheet template available for you to download here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IsFLKF9kiZZ8Cp8fKrJkmhGODWy-Xkisa1MIzSHXHtw
(We’ve put the template in a Google Spreadsheet, so you can always access the latest version of it)
Automate all the things
As you can see, there’s some administration involved in keeping the Data Register up-to-date. In essence, the Data Register can be this spreadsheet on someone’s computer, but we suggest storing the Data Register on your website. This makes it possible to automate certain parts of storing. For example, we can store the consents from forms or the delete requests automatically in the Data Register of the WP-GDPR plugin.
Of course, since not every request or consent comes from the website, there should be an option to manually add records to the Data Register.
In future releases, we will try to make more integrations possible to automatically store the consent. We will start with the WP-GDPR Core and the add-ons.
Today we released the first version of the WP-GDPR Woocommerce add-on.
With this add-on, a customer can access its personal data without having to login.
Also, a request to delete the data can be made.
Of course, we don’t delete the billing information, since this is required by law.
In a later version, we will let users manage their personal data from within the “My Account” section.
If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Get the add-on now
Released WP-GDPR 1.4.3 for our core plugin.
This release contains
- Fix: Deprecated warning
- Fix: When request form is embedded on a non-standard page. Until now, you got a 404-error when redirecting to the “Thank you”-page
- Fix: Confirmation of processing the delete request shows a short reference to what happened to the data
- Enhancement: Add table header “request language”
As you see in the list above, we mostly fixed issues and did small improvements to this core plugin.
If you encounter another problem or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
We would like to give everyone a quick update on what’s in store the coming weeks for WP-GDPR, and touch a hot topic lately : User Experience.
Most people using WP-GDPR know what the plugin does and why it is this unique but alot of people new to WP-GDPR can get confused after their first look at the plugin. To change that the upcoming 1.5 release will provide a better user experience and we will try to make our website more focused on how the plugin works.
We planned the following changes related to user experience :
- As of 1.5 users will be able to style the access request form directly from the settings.
- A new help page where users will get information about how to use or set-up WP-GDPR
- Tooltips in most areas of the plugin
- A complete tutorial section on our website
- A chart on what is included out of the box when installing the plugin or add-ons
- One click links to add-ons based on installed plugins ( list of plugins page )
While we prepare this update we are open for suggestions and feedback on our usual channel. Need help? Let us know!
Do you like our hard work? Drop us a review.
Starting 25 May 2018 all companies that process personal data of EU citizens are obliged to be GDPR compliant, this document serves as a guideline on how to make your clients GDPR aware.
What is GDPR?
GDPR wants to address the new ways of exploiting personal data through the internet and cloud technology. It also wants to give businesses a clearer legal environment in which to operate throughout the EU.
The GDPR introduces new accountability obligations, stronger rights and restrictions on international data flows. It gives people more say over what companies can do with their data.
The data that is protected by this regulation is all information about an identified or identifiable person. This can be his name, address, e-mail, but also a cookie, photo or ip-address. When you can use the data to find out who the person is, it is personal data and therefore protected by the GDPR. An organisation must do everything in its power to secure the data and have required procedures in place.
No panic! Just be aware and work towards being compliant
What can I do for my client?
Check with your client whether he collects and stores personal data. When he stores the data you need to make your client GDPR aware.
Your clients needs to understand the changes in collecting, storing and managing personal data and what they need to do in order to keep this data safe. The new regulation attaches great importance to transparency and holds companies responsible for safeguarding the collection, use and storage of individuals’ personal data. Personal data must be processed fairly and accurately, and can not be kept longer than necessary.
Companies are advised to ensure that they have detailed procedures to detect, report and investigate a personal data breach.
Use this roadmap to make your clients website GDPR Ready or use it as a plan to make your client GDPR aware :
- Audit his data: Find out what personal data is already held. Check for adequate consent. If not, delete the data or ask for consent. Keep in mind that pre-ticked boxes and soft opt-ins no longer count with GDPR. Show that you are doing your best to protect the personal information of individuals and minimize the chance that it will end up in the wrong hands.
- Update consent boxes: Create opt-in boxes to ask consent to store personal data. Explain very clearly why this data will be collected, how and for how long the data will be kept for. Start campaigns that will run to get people to opt-in again.
- Know your visitors rights: Make sure a visitor can view, edit, download and delete his personal data. Use our core plugin our on of our addon’s to help your clients with this step.
- Prepare for a data breach: Ensure the correct procedures are in place to detect and report loss or theft of personal data.
- Keep personal data safe: Make sure the data is kept on a secure server. When the data is also mailed or can be exported, make sure the person getting this info knows GDPR and keep a policy for this offline data.
- Appoint someone to own GDPR: Regardless of whether your client needs one, have someone take ownership of GDPR.
If you have any questions regarding GDPR just ask your question through our live chat support.
Released version 1.4.1 from the WP-GDPR Core plugin.
This release contains
- an improved autoloader
- a fix to prevent conflicts with the Jetpack comments
In the support forum, therecipettes and tauchenalow23 pointed at the conflict. Since many of you use Jetpack features, we thought it important to do a minor release.
If you encounter another problem or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to ask!
We released version 1.4.0 of the WP-GDPR Core plugin.
A lot of improvements were released, but we’d like to highlight a few of them:
- Add DPO email address
- Option to not show the comments section
- Add settings feature
- Stop form submition after refreshing
- Add filter to implement checkbox in other commentforms
- Update DE language (thanks Ritchie!)
Also we made the codebase of the core plugin compatible with PHP version 5.3
Download from the plugin directory:
After receiving several suggestions we decided to add alternative payment methods to obtain our premium addons. From now on you will be able to buy our WP-GDPR WordPress add-ons with the following payment methods :
Spotted a payment method we forgot? Let us know through our contact form !
Everone working with WordPress has heard from WooCommerce. Many of us probably build at least one website with it. According to Builf With, 42% of all ecommerce websites have WooCommerce as its engine.
Source: https://trends.builtwith.com/shop
When you place an order in WooCommerce, some important but personal data is required.
You have to store some of the data for some years as stated in laws. Other parts of the data are optional and need to be manageable according to GDPR.
As you can see, there are many things to keep in mind when handling personal data in combination with GDPR.
From today on, we will be working on an add-on to help you make your WooCommerce GDPR compliant.
Update:
On March 28th, 2018 we launched the WP-GDPR WooCommerce add-on.
It’s available on this website: https://wp-gdpr.eu/add-ons/woocommerce-add-on/
Today we release a new add-on for the WP-GDPR core plugin.
With the WP GDPR CFDB7 add-on we help you to let visitors view, manage, update and request to delete its data. This makes your website more in line with GDPR.
If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!