Business Monitor Are you ready?
Have you heard of GDPR? Thought not. Marketing expert Paul Clapham takes a look at this piece of legislation that affects every business but appears to have been introduced under the radar.
T
he General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) sticks out like a sore thumb as the title of a piece of government legislation, in this case a piece of EU legislation. Any Brexiteers throwing their hands in the air should recognise that we will be subject to such laws for at least two years.
GDPR has been in the creation process while our eyes have been taken off the ball by Brexit. But it is now about to land in every business ownerʼs lap because it will be implemented on May 25, 2018 – just round the corner.
It is also getting increasing amounts of publicity across print media. Yet a lot of the business owners and managers who will have to work with GDPR appear to know next to nothing about it. That isnʼt totally surprising. Most small businesses – garment decorators as a classic case – would look at the issue and think, ʻIʼve got a database that varies between 300 and 350 at any given time; this canʼt refer to meʼ. Unfortunately it does. Itʼs like any law – it applies to everyone equally.
Crawling out of the woodwork What is more the whole issue has really only just crawled out of the woodwork, so nobody can yet be confident of how it will be implemented. The principle of the GDPR is to even up the playing field between the private individual and big businesses. The small business appears to have been left out of the equation. There are new rights for people to access the information companies hold about them, obligations for better data management for businesses, and a new regime of fines.
Plenty of attention has been paid to the new punitive levels of fines that will apply if you donʼt stick to the rules. Facebook, which took a kicking in the courts in Belgium recently on this issue, has been exampled as potentially being liable to a fine of up to £1.6 billion – itʼs based on a percentage of worldwide turnover. No doubt it has the technological and legal expertise to avoid anything like as nasty. Obviously that doesnʼt apply to the typical garment decorator. Fear not. Governments throughout Europe might love the idea of using GDPR as a means of gouging money out of Google, Facebook and Amazon, having
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
failed to do so via the tax system, but the smaller business appears to be off the regulatorsʼ radar for the time being. That is no excuse for ignoring GDPR, but the good news is that you are probably compliant already. You donʼt run your business like the three above- named behemoths. You actually do give a monkeys – about your customers and your own reputation. You could go on a course and, sure enough, providers are popping up like weeds. Which invariably happens when a new and potentially scary issue like GDPR raises its ugly head. I am told that these people are knowledgable rather than expert. You may think ʻok thatʼs good enough to get me up to speedʼ. It probably isnʼt because these courses tend to be heavily focused on business to consumer marketing issues, rather than business to business issues. If you think a one day course is a good idea make sure you will be getting what you need before you part with hard cash.
Ignore scaremongering
Elizabeth Denham, the UK information commissioner and hence head honcho of implementing GDPR here, not least enforcement of same, says that she is frustrated by the amount of scaremongering around the potential
impact for businesses. “The GDPR is a step change for data protection” she says, “itʼs still an evolution, not a revolution.” Sorry, Elizabeth, your frustration is your own fault. OK, none of us has been paying attention and for sure the whole subject is, to put it mildly, uninspiring, but you have had coming up two years to get us all onto the same page and it just hasnʼt happened. Little wonder, then, that now the manure is about to come in contact with the air conditioning unit, journalists have hit the scaremonger key. (Incidentally it is standard for new EU legislation to have a two year preparation period between being passed and implemented to enable businesses and public bodies affected by changes to prepare for them; who knew?).
The GDPR changes how personal data can be used. Its provisions in the UK will be covered by a new Data Protection Bill, recently published by the government. Itʼs the word ʻrecentlyʼ in that sentence which defines the sense of sudden urgency that applies to this issue.
GDPR covers both personal data and sensitive personal data. Personal data broadly means any piece of information that can be used to identify a person – name, address, phone number internet address etc. Sensitive personal data
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