Having a GDPR compliance checklist is a must to be GDPR compliant in a world where the count of security breaches is increasing with every passing day. With a proper list at hand, you can easily fulfill the GDPR compliance requirements – securing your organization’s data and saving yourself from heavy fines. So, without wasting another second, jump to the coming section to grab your GPDR audit checklist.
GDPR Compliance Checklist: Uncovered!
As stated by GDPR.EU, the regulation itself is large, far-reaching, and fairly light on specifics, making GDPR compliance a difficult prospect, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). But going through this checklist will surely help you enough to align with it.
Perform an information audit to identify the following:
- The information you process.
- The purpose of processing it.
- The organization members and third parties who hold access to it.
- The locations of the third parties that have access.
- The data protection techniques you are using.
- When you expect to remove or erase the information. (optional)
Justify your data processing activities legally based on at least one of the six conditions listed by GDPR.
- If you are dealing with the personal data of children and special categories, consider reading and following the official GDPR articles from 7 to 11.
- If you opt for “consent” as your lawful basis, ensure that the consent must be freely given, specific, informed, unambiguous, and can be revoked.
- If you choose “legitimate interests” as your lawful basis, you must be able to show you have performed a privacy impact assessment.
Add details about your data processing and legal justification clearly and concisely to your privacy policy.
- Explain how you process the data, who holds access to it, and how you protect it. (Offer the given information to the data subjects as well when you collect their data.)
Protect the data at every step.
- Follow the data protection by design and by default principles.
- Implement the principles relating to the processing of personal data.
- Encrypt, anonymize and pseudonymize the personal data wherever it’s possible.
- Limit the amount of personal data you collect.
- Get rid of the data that you don’t need anymore.
- Curate an internal security policy for your organization.
- Train your employees and compliance team regarding GDPR and data security.
- Perform a data protection impact assessment before your process personal data. Use this checklist given by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to carry it out easily.
In case of a data breach, notify your data subjects and the authorities.
- Notify the supervisory authority in your jurisdiction within 72 hours of a data breach.
- Inform the data subjects quickly if their stolen data can put them at risk.
- Organizations in English-speaking non-EU countries can easily notify the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland.
Hold someone accountable for GDPR compliance in your organization.
- The person should evaluate and implement the data protection policies.
Sign a data processing agreement between the third parties that’ll process personal data on your behalf and your organization.
In case you are operating your organization outside the EU, you must have a representative in one of the EU member states to communicate with the data protection authorities.
- If you are concerned with processing data related to the people in a specific member state, appoint a representative in the respective country.
- Public bodies and similar organizations don’t need to have a representative in the EU.
Hire a Data Protection Officer (DPO) who’ll monitor GDPR compliance, advise on data protection impact assessments, assess data protection risks, and cooperate with regulators.
Your customers or users can easily request and get the information you have about them.
- Once you verify their identity, let them know what information you have, how you use it, for how long you’ll retain their details, and why.
- Offer the data in an easily shareable and commonly readable format, like a spreadsheet.
- For the first time, you can send the information free of cost.
- For further requests, you can charge a reasonable fee.
- Don’t take a month or more to fulfill their request – Answer them within a month.
Implement a data quality process.
- After verifying the user’s identity, allow them to update their information to ensure completeness and accuracy.
- Fulfill their request for rectification within a month.
Allow your customers to easily ask you to delete their personal information.
- Verify their identity and respond to their request within a month.
- You can deny their request on the basis of compliance with a legal obligation, or freedom of speech.
Your users can request you to stop processing their information.
- The acceptable reasons include any dispute regarding the accuracy of the information or the lawfulness of data processing.
- Answer their query within a month.
- You can still store the data even if you don’t process it.
- Before you resume data processing, don’t forget to inform the data subject.
The data subjects can object to you for processing their information.
- You can’t use your users’ personal data for direct marketing.
- You might be able to challenge their objection if you can demonstrate a legal basis for processing personal data even if the data subject objects to it.
If you use automated processes to make decisions about people, you’ll need to set up a process to ensure you are securing their freedoms, rights, and legitimate interests.
Important Note
The GDPR compliance requirements don’t end here. Based on your specific circumstances, there might be more requirements that you need to fulfill to become GDPR compliant. Talk to our experts to know about any additional requirements, and achieve complete GDPR compliance with ease.
Fulfill GDPR Compliance Requirements With ComplyNexus
ComplyNexus steps in as a modern compliance document management system that streamlines your compliance process and helps you become compliant with various compliance policies, standards, and regulations, including GDPR.
It offers you a checklist for each compliance framework, centralized audit management, AI-generated detailed gap analysis reports and analytics, evidence documentation, etc, ensuring that you don’t have to deal with the consequences of non-compliance, including the imposition of heavy fines.
FAQs
Which Organizations Must Comply With GDPR?
Any organization that collects, stores, or processes the data of EU citizens or residents must comply with GDPR. It shows that here, the location of the organization itself doesn’t matter.
How Much Fine Is Imposed Due to GDPR Non-compliance?
You’ll be charged a maximum €20 million or 4% of global revenue (whichever is higher) due to GDPR non-compliance. Also, remember that the data subjects can demand compensation for the damages, too.
What Are the Data Protection and Accountability Principles of GDPR?
The data protection and accountability principles of GDPR are lawfulness, fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity and confidentiality, and accountability.
Conclusion
The GDPR compliance checklist given above must have made GDPR compliance a doable task for you. Next, using an AI compliance document management system like ComplyNexus will minimize your compliance efforts and time. So, don’t delay it more, or you’ll be closer to those GDPR penalties.
We want to see you always winning the compliance game.
