Social Media Won’t Be the Same After GDPR Comes

You might have already seen such news. If you haven’t, you must know what GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) is and why it is so important for everyone who processes or stores personal data of EU citizens. This regulation comes into effect on May 25. Less than a month is left for preparation, or your company may get serious penalties from 20K Euro to 4% of the annual turnover.

No matter whether you have one European client from a million or Europeans are just 0.01% of your overall traffic or Facebook fans of your page, you will obligatory need to be GDPR compliant.

It is done by the European Commission for the better protection of EU citizens’ rights and data privacy. Despite the fact that GDPR was adopted two years ago, many companies are still not ready for May 25 and haven’t implemented new rules to their business.

At the moment, there are tons of web resources, databases, services, websites, stores, media portals and other resources that collect, process and store their visitors’ personal data. A growing number of all these Internet services caused the necessity of creating GDPR. It guards EU citizens’ rights against illegality on every website collecting personal data, social media are not the exception.  

Your personal rights

In case you use social media for your personal purposes, you don’t have to worry about GDPR. However, if you want your personal data and rights be protected, know what GDPR is and what it allows you as a web user. For instance, you have the right to be forgotten, it means that you can claim your data to be deleted. In this case, you need to discuss it with the data controller, but not with third-parties. The data controller is a company or an individual who decides how to use your personal data.

Prepare and you won’t fail

In case you use social media as a company or a business, you have to adapt to some changes herald by GDPR.

Your followers and fans have to provide you with explicit consent to make sure their data goes along with GDPR. If your company captures followers’ personal data and transfers it to external resources, that should be covered by PDP (data protection clauses).

Cover all bases

Surely, for large companies such as Facebook, there is a plenty of things to do and tons of features to implement.

Anyway, adopting of explicit consent has to start with informing each user that their data may be processed, collected or transferred, they have the right to provide you with it or not. Every aspect should be written separately.

If you have a list of procedures you make with users’ personal data, make a list of them with a tick-box near to each of them.

What does GDPR mean for social media?

The new regulation will change the things go for social media now. You have to know what GDPR is about and how it works regardless of your role (a user, a business owner or an employee).

Some changes seem difficult and it is really so, however, GDPR means benefits for your business, and adapting to new conditions means innovations to your business and the new level of trust from the client side.

To find more details on GDPR, check out our ultimate checklist for becoming GDPR compliant.