Safeguarding your reputation under the GDPR

Feb 18, 2019 12:00:00 AM | Safeguarding your reputation under the GDPR

 

The fines usually attract the most attention when discussing the GDPR. Four percent of your worldwide annual turnover sounds scary - and ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’ sell. But when we focus on the main risk of being noncompliant with the new privacy regulation, then the logical conclusion is that your reputation is what is at stake. So, how can you safeguard your organisation’s reputation in the field of personal data protection?

Big companies regularly become the center of media attention when it comes to privacy infringements. The 2014 Yahoo data breach that became public only in 2016, the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal combining a breach and political manipulation, leading to a publicity storm in early 2018, the LinkedIn breach that leaked more than 100 million user names and passwords in 2012. All these are examples of misuses of personal data backfiring to the organisations that allegedly caused them or tried to cover them up.

We regularly get comments on our own privacy compliance. Some of them are clearly false (comments suggesting that our newsletter tickbox is on by default, which it isn’t), but other comments concern things we want to address more elaborately, such as the tracking technology that is used by default in Mailchimp. We sum up a few guidelines that we try to adhere to as much as possible, and might be useful for your organisation as well.

Be transparent

Yes, retaining data ‘as long as necessary for the purpose for which they were provided’ is a legitimate description of your retention policy under the GDPR. However, we came to the conclusion that we can be more precise than that, and we will soon add more concrete information on this matter to our privacy policy. This helps data subjects (GDPR speak for customers, employees etc.) to understand data processing policies, which have to be transparent according to article 12 GDPR.

It’s generally considered a cardinal sin of modern review communication to remove user comments instead of responding to them. Although I must admit that I have considered removing obviously false comments on LinkedIn, we decided, in principle, not to. Usually, we respond to all comments. It’s a policy that many companies now use online: always remain polite, remain close to the facts, and be grateful for both positive and negative feedback. Good examples for a proper tone of voice can be found in responses to hotel and restaurant reviews on Tripadvisor.

Be pragmatic

Our first public website did not have cookies. None. We did not even know how many visitors the site attracted - only if someone filled in one of the forms we could follow up. Whereas it’s great to have an extremely privacy-friendly website, it’s also a serious threat to business. So we decided that we really needed to know more of our visitors. So we started to use analytics software to learn about visit patterns.

However, we thoroughly evaluate any tool for its GDPR compliance before we use it. For instance, we rejected an otherwise excellent chat tool because it basically collects any data it could get from a user. We decided to use Mailchimp - despite its ‘liberal’ use of tracking technologies - because it’s a de facto standard, but we’re still working on the communication about it. And we’re currently considering to use visitor tracking technologies for retargeting purposes. Do we want this? And if so, what will be the impact on the user’s privacy? In every decision, we take we have to balance our business objectives and the ways to safeguard the data privacy of our website users.

Be prepared

Waiting for the first data breach or data subject request to occur is not a good strategy. Remember that your organisation needs an overview (according to article 30 GDPR) of what happens where in the organisation with personal data in order to respond to most of the rights and obligations imposed. This register is the backbone of your privacy governance. If you have your register in place, combined with an action plan for actual breach situations (see our whitepaper here), you can take appropriate action in case it’s needed.

Also, be aware that data subject requests can quickly become the real world analogy of a ‘distributed denial of service attack’. When you have hundreds of thousands of customers, and only a very small percentage of them asks you to deliver the personal data you store of them, you still might have a massive problem for your organisation. Again, the article 30 register will help here, but it doesn’t save you from the necessity of collecting real data for real individuals.

Be approachable

Data subjects are much less likely to consciously ‘annoy’ you with a data subject request if they trust the organisation with their personal data. Responding quickly to questions, in a transparent manner, will generally reduce the risk of online ‘attacks’ to your privacy policy and compliance. You will, however, be a target for critical assessments by the public if you are active in the personal data domain (as we are). And that should be perfectly fine.