Guide

GDPR Compliance: A Guide to Protecting Your Organization

This is part of a series on data compliance.

Table of Contents

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive data protection law that gives individuals greater control over their personal data. It applies to any organization that processes the personal data of EU residents, regardless of the organization's location. Non-compliance with the GDPR can result in hefty fines, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust.

The GDPR is built on seven key principles:

Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency: Data processing must be lawful, fair, and transparent to the data subject.
Purpose limitation: Data must be collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes.
Data minimization: Data collected should be adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary.
Accuracy: Data must be accurate and kept up to date.
Storage limitation: Data should be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary.
Integrity and confidentiality: Data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unauthorized processing.
Accountability: The data controller is responsible for and must be able to demonstrate compliance with the GDPR.

Key Obligations for Organizations

To achieve GDPR compliance, organizations must:

Appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO): In certain cases, organizations must appoint a DPO to oversee data protection activities.
Conduct Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs): For high-risk processing activities, organizations must conduct DPIAs to assess the impact on data subjects.
Implement Appropriate Technical and Organizational Measures: Organizations must implement measures to protect personal data, such as encryption, access controls, and data breach notification procedures.
Respect Data Subject Rights: Organizations must respect individuals' rights, including the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and transfer their personal data.
Comply with Data Breach Notification Requirements: In the event of a data breach, organizations must notify the supervisory authority and, in certain cases, data subjects.

While GDPR doesn't explicitly mandate encryption, it strongly implies its necessity through its emphasis on reasonable security measures to protect personal information.

Indirect Requirement: GDPR requires businesses to implement " appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed." (Article 25(2)). GDPR goes further in stating that encryption is one of the appropriate measures in “the pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data” (Article 32(1))
Data Breach Reporting and Penalties: Article 34 (3)(a) has exceptions on reporting a data breach

the controller has implemented appropriate technical and organisational protection measures, and those measures were applied to the personal data affected by the personal data breach, in particular those that render the personal data unintelligible to any person who is not authorised to access it, such as encryption;

In other words, if data is stolen, but it was encrypted, then the breach does not have to be reported and is not subject to fines. This exception is a powerful endorsement for encrypting data.
Data Sovereignty: Encryption can be used to enable storage of GDPR data in the cloud and in non-EU countries. GDPR published Recommendations 01/2020 on measures that supplement transfer tools to ensure compliance with the EU level of protection of personal data Version 2.0 where Use Case 1 is using encryption for cloud providers and Use Case 3 is for protection against countries where the government can demand the data. This includes the US.

Data Mapping: Identify and document all personal data processed by your organization.
Privacy Policy Review: Ensure your privacy policy is compliant with GDPR requirements.
Employee Training: Educate employees about their data protection responsibilities.
Third-Party Assessment: Consider engaging a third-party to assess your GDPR compliance.
Incident Response Plan: Develop a plan to respond to data breaches effectively.

Conclusion

Achieving GDPR compliance can be a complex process, but it is essential for protecting your organization and building trust with customers. By understanding the core principles, obligations, and practical steps outlined in this blog, you can take significant strides towards GDPR compliance.