Guest Blogger Ekaterina Zelenkova: “With an economics background and over 12 years’ experience in the fields of finance, financial online journalism and management, Ekaterina has an exhaustive ground for passionate work in new market development, financial content writing and analysis. During the last 8 years, she has worked on digital projects too, and more recently with interpreting and translation services, web design, financial content writing and digital consultancy.”
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect on May 25 this year. To support website owners all over the world and to help them easily and fluently comply with the new important rules WordPress added new features to their platform. You may need some digital skills training in this area if you are unfamiliar with GDPR.
The GDPR obliges site owners and companies to be transparent about how they collect, use, and share your personal data. The new regulation gives individuals more rights when it comes to how their own personal data is collected, used, and shared too.
It is good to be reminded that the requirements of GDPR apply to all websites and online businesses that collect, store and process personal data from EU residents no matter where the business is located.
Noncompliance with the new regulation can cost you or your business a lot. Local Data Protection Authority has the right to penalise you starting with a warning only. Passing through suspension of data processing businesses or website owners can be fined up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual turnover.
It is really a great relief for those individuals and companies with websites on WordPress, since recently they have updated the basic necessary tools to prepare their users websites to comply with GDPR.
Thanks to the new privacy features added to the content management platform it is easy to make all needed changes in order to stay within the law.
Take a look at the video below for some digital skills training on GDPR.
The latest functionalities released in May WordPress 4.9.6. are as follows:
The first one is that you have an option to create a Privacy Policy Page. You can choose to automatically make a new sample page, or you can edit an existing one.
The second feature refers to blog posts’ comments. Readers who want to make comments can now choose whether their name, email address, and website are saved in a cookie on their browser.
The third major set of features in WordPress gives the flexibility to deal with requests for personal data. Even for non-experts it is now possible to export or erase personal data. Website owners can easily export a file containing a user’s personal data from the data gathered by WordPress and participating plugins. They can also erase personal data upon a user’s request.
To save you time and hassle I have done a short video as part of this post. It will teach you digital skills on how to use the new WordPress features related to the compliance with GDPR.
