GEEK QUEEN
Protect Yourself GDPR Compliance
Jenny Marsden • Oct 23, 2019
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Protect yourself and your website with gdpr compliance
So many bloggers and businesses want to skip paying for appropriate legal pages for their website. While there may be no legal requirement to have Terms and Conditions on your website, its always the smart move to have them. Privacy policies however are now required and its important they are not just on your website but easy to find.
Read my post on Legal pages
you need now for a more indepth explanation of this subject.
For now I'm going to focus on GDPR compliance.
why do i have to be gdpr compliant?
To begin with I'v written a post about understanding GDPR
so maybe you might want to start there.
In a condensed version:
GDPR serves countries in the European Union and is a policy that states how, when and what information may be gathered & used from a website.
A lot of clients have asked why they need to be GDPR compliant when their business is in Australia. While I understand that they are not deliberately serving content to European citzens, of course anyone can see your website so you do have to be compliant.
What options are available?
Firstly you could pay your solicitor to draw up the following documents for you:
- GDPR compliant privacy policy & extra's like
- website terms and conditions of use
- disclaimer & if you are an ecommerce application
- your sales and shipping terms and conditions
This would of course provide you with the most customised legal terms for your own business, however it could also cost you a decent chunk of change.
An alternative is to get your basic legals pages sorted via an online provider. I personally use The Contract Shop for bloggers and coaching or online course websites and have been pretty impressed with the level of documentation they have available. My usual go to is their Website Terms Of Use and the Privacy policy package. It is usually $277 USD (which with our exchange rate can hurt) however it's a small price to pay to be assured that you have the basics sorted.
If my client is more business oriented, I tend to use this package from Amira at A Self Guru. Her website packages are a little cheaper at $180 USD but offer the same level of cover as The Contract Shop.
Of course you should always check with your legal provider before making any decision as to the legal documents on your website, and I'm not in any way providing legal advice here, however this is a great place to start.
Both of these documents are included in my website packages and should you require anything further I'm more than happy to add any other legal pages you provide.
Does this give you GDPR protection?
Yes both these packages from The Contract Shop or A Self Guru
do include GDPR protection.
Even though you might be located outside the EU, if your privacy policy doesn’t have GDPR provisions, you could still be breaking international law. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), is the European Union’s set of laws regulating data privacy. Under this law if someone from the EU visits your website you still have to ensure that their information is protected under those laws. That is why you see the Cookie Policy popups everywhere now.
Violators of GDPR could face fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the last financial year, whichever is greater.
Check out this list of fines
on Wikipedia. You can see its a very real occurrence and isn't limited to big business.
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About Jenny
I started my IT career in Database Administration and .Net coding. While I LOVED that work, I realised very quickly that I also wanted a life. To be a top end coder or DB Admin, you have to comit your downtime to constantly learning and evolving and while that is also something I love, I wanted it to be my work and not my life. So I morphed my love of design with my knowledge of all things SEO and moved into building small business websites.
Why small business websites? I'm a small business myself and I know how hard it can be so I wanted to give my clients a great service, with an approachable point of contact where no question was a "stupid question".
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