Data protection Archives - GDPR Advisors

15 04, 2024

Boosting Awareness: A Guide to Effective GDPR and Information Security Activities

As a business owner, you're well aware of the importance of GDPR compliance and information security. However, maintaining awareness among your staff can be a challenge. It needs to be something that is memorable, educational, cost effective and engaging, not a short list! I have set out below some different activities you could try to help raise awareness effectively. 1. Regular Training Sessions One of the most effective ways to instill good data protection [...]

8 04, 2024

Ongoing Awareness Activities: Your Key to Promoting Good GDPR and Information Security Practices

As a small business owner, you may be juggling multiple hats and responsibilities. Among these, ensuring the security and integrity of your business's data, especially under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is crucial. Ongoing awareness activities support increased knowledge and reduce the risk of data breaches and can not only enhance your business's data protection practices but provide a host of additional benefits too. 1. Ensuring Compliance with GDPR GDPR compliance is not [...]

1 04, 2024

The Role of Cyber Security in Protecting Your Small Business Data

As a small business owner, you understand that your data is one of your most valuable assets. It's the lifeblood of your operations, key to your growth strategy, and often, the base to build relationships with customers. But in an increasingly digital world, this data is under relentless attack. That's where cyber security steps in. Cyber security is not just a buzzword. It's a necessity for businesses of all sizes, especially for small businesses [...]

25 03, 2024

Why Small Businesses Can’t Ignore Data Protection and information security

Many small business owners think they are too small to be a target for cyber criminals, the truth is that companies of all sizes face major risks when it comes to data breaches and lack of information security procedures. Failure to properly secure customer data can result in severe penalties, legal liability, and a devastating loss of customer trust. The Devastating Impact for One Small Retailer We took a call this week from a [...]

23 01, 2024

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) – The risks and rewards

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a popular policy where employees use personal devices for work. This typically means using personal smartphones or laptops to access company systems and data. While convenient, BYOD introduces cybersecurity risks that organisations must address. Failure to secure personal devices puts sensitive company information at risk. When employees access internal systems on insecure devices outside the corporate network, businesses lose control of that data. Without proper BYOD policies and [...]

25 06, 2023

What’s the difference between GDPR and Data Protection?

"What is the difference between GDPR and Data Protection?" is a questions I asked the other day. It can be very confusing as we use the term GDPR regularly to describe a piece a legislation we need to adhere to. GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation. It’s the European wide legislation brought in in 2018, that created a tsunami of changes to the way businesses collect, store and destroy personal information. In [...]

14 02, 2023

What is special category data?

Special category data is personal information that needs more protection because it is considered sensitive under data protection legislation. There are nine special categories of personal information. They are information that relates to: - race, racial and ethnic origin; - political opinions; - religious or philosophical beliefs; - trade union membership; - genetic data; - biometric data such as fingerprints, eye scanners, but only where it's being used for identification purposes; - health information; [...]

17 01, 2023

What is your password policy and is it effective?

What is your password policy and is it effective? Frequent password changes are one of the things many organisations advocate and actively manage by expiring a password so that it has to be replaced. We are helping a client obtain Cyber Essentials Certification and have been looking at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) website, which has a different viewpoint on passwords. Password changes are designed to limit the harm that comes from an [...]

10 01, 2023

How long do you have to respond to a Subject Access Request?

Two days before Christmas we had a call to the helpline about a Subject Access Request. A company had received a request and the requestor had said that they had 14 days to respond and provide the information. Obviously with all the Christmas and New Year bank holidays, the company were panicking about responding within 14 days. Firstly, the response time for a subject access request is one calendar month. The person making the [...]

16 05, 2022

Legitimate interest as a lawful basis is not an excuse to market to everyone.

This week through the helpline, we had a call from a company who had used legitimate interests to scrape email addresses from the web, and then send them marketing information. They explained that marketing emails were in their interests and the interests of the person emailed so they could place their services and goods on the caller’s platform for sale. There are very specific rules about email marketing both in data Protection legislation and [...]

30 04, 2022

Email Marketing – Do I need a tickbox?

Back to Basics and email marketing. Over the last couple of weeks we've been looking at some email marketing signup forms. And it's quite interesting when an organisation decides to put a tick box, although sometimes it's the software that has a tick box that you cannot remove. When someone is signing up for your email marketing list, you might create a form where someone can insert their email address and there's a tick [...]

18 04, 2022

Are your suppliers protecting your business information?

We find clients don't often think about supplier risk. Currently we're working with a company to implement ISO27001 and as part of that process, we are checking their suppliers for information security standards and GDPR etc. As part of checking suppliers for compliance, we needed a list of the suppliers and this particular company have outsourced their finance function to an accountancy firm. We asked the accountants to provide a list of the suppliers [...]

2 03, 2022

Dealing with special category information related to health

Under data protection legislation, health information is considered a special category of personal information. This means that it needs some additional controls in place to be able to collect and store it. There are a number of special categories and health information is one of the most commonly used because we collect it through various channels within our businesses. Today, we're just going to focus on those companies that collect it because they deal [...]