May 9, 2018
You may have heard about GDPR, a monumental and global shift in how data privacy is handled. If you haven’t, you need to know how this change in the digital information landscape will affect you, especially if you use our platform for ticketing, event registration or donations. This may sound daunting, but don’t worry, here’s a quick primer on what it is and how Webconnex is changing to accommodate these requirements.[embed]https://webconnex.wistia.com/medias/kwbjezqsmt[/embed]
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a new set of online data privacy standards set by the European Union, and will go into effect on May 25, 2018. These new regulations aim to provide more transparency and privacy control to customers within the EU.Because so many online products have a global reach, GDPR’s effect goes well beyond Europe and will change how companies worldwide handle their data and privacy, including Webconnex.We’ve studied these new regulations and are updating our system to be compliant with GDPR. We wanted to give you a heads up on what you can expect to experience within our system after May 25th, as well as what it might mean for you and how you handle the data of your customers.If you’re looking for a general overview of what GDPR is, this is a pretty good read.Here’s some basics of what you can expect from Webconnex in a post-GDPR-world.
One of the biggest elements of GDPR is to give customers the ability to submit a personal data deletion request. This will be integrated into Webconnex through our Customer Portal, which will be opened to all customers. Your customer will be able to submit this request, which will be queued before we remove their personal data from our system. Financial information -purchase amounts, number of tickets sold, etc.- will remain so you can monitor income levels, but data that can be traced to a specific person (name, address, etc., aka personal data) will be removed entirely from our system.
This same ability will also be given to you, as a user of our products. If you’d like, you can choose to have any kind of personal data (names, addresses, emails, etc.) removed from our system, in a similar process to your customers. Your request would go into a queue, where it will be reviewed and affected after a short waiting period.
Our excellent data encryption is being expanded, with encryption covering more types of data. We will also be adding into your fields a new option to choose whether that information collected on your event page will be encrypted and kept private. These new expansions of our data privacy protocols will help prevent against breaches, which also protects against the misuse and exploitation of you and your customer’s data.
We’ve updated our employees’ workflow policies, such as how they handle emails and messages, to reflect the concerns of GDPR. We have also made sure that all of the other companies we work with to make Webconnex awesome have also updated their policies and procedures to reflect GDPR.
In the lead up to GDPR, you may have noticed your inbox being flooded with new Terms of Service updates from all your favorite tech companies. We’re doing it too. A lot of these discussed changes, and more, will appear within the new ToS that all of our users will see. It will contain all that legal jargon we love so much, which is necessary to help us protect the privacy of you and your customers.
Even if your company is based outside of Europe, these new regulations affect you, especially if you have any customers or donors from the EU. While these tools will help you navigate your customer’s data within our system, your customer’s data ultimately belongs to you. It’s your data, you control it! This means that you are responsible for tracking down and deleting data that you may have gathered in our system, but have put into another, including Zapier integrations all the way down to exported spreadsheets. Even if your business is strictly outside the EU, it’s still a good idea to follow these new regulations, as they’re all generally a good idea.We know these new GDPR regulations can seem intimidating, but you can be assured that we’ve worked hard to make sure we’re complying with these new regulations. You will start to see these changes, among other, nerdier things, to be in place within our system by May 25th. You’ll hear more details in our upcoming product update videos and webinars.If you have questions, please contact us and we’ll help put your mind at ease. We understand how crucial personal data privacy is. As GDPR and other policies shift and change, you can be sure that we’ll be shifting and changing alongside them to meet these new expectations.