What is the GDPR and how can it affect our WordPress website?

Written by Posted On Friday, 08 June 2018 19:42

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If you pay attention to the news, you have probably seen this strange acronym of four letters that appear more and more among webmasters (perhaps with a sense of panic): GDPR.

What does this acronym mean? Do you need to worry about this as a website owner?

In this post, we will see a general description of what the GDPR is and how it might affect a WordPress website.

First of all, I have to say that I am not a lawyer (the only owner of the web reinspirit ), so do not take anything of what I write as legal advice. But if you just need a good general understanding of what GDPR is, as well as how you should approach it on your WordPress site, take a look at this article.

What is the GDPR?

The GDPR is the acronym for "General Data Protection Regulation", which is a law of the European Union that focuses on data protection and user privacy. It is an update of the Data Protection Directive of 1995. Although the law was originally approved in 2016, it included a 2-year grace period to allow compliance. That grace period is almost over and the GDPR will take effect on May 25, 2018.

Simplifying a bit more, it's something like those cookie notifications that you've seen appear everywhere but on steroids.

Although the law of cookies affected something limited, notifying users that use cookies on their site, GDPR is much deeper and affects:

  1. Storage of personal data
  2. Processing of personal data

Personal data is defined as follows; "It is any information related to an identified or identifiable natural person". This is like everything related to a person's data, for example, the name, email, IP address, etc. All can be defined as personal data.

On the other hand, the processing of personal data is any operation or set of operations that are carried out with personal data or data sets, either by automated means or not. Therefore, even if you manually process that personal data, they are still included in the GDPR.

You can see the full text of these parts here.

In general, the GDPR requires:

  • Get consent for many actions, such as storing someone's email when leaving a comment on your site
  • Provide users with access to the data you have in them, as well as an option to eliminate that data (the right to be forgotten)
  • Notify users of any data breach (this is especially difficult because many small webmasters may not realize when a violation occurred on your site)

Is the GDPR important to you as a regular WordPress user?

Yes. At least according to the law. GDPR applies to all websites that handle data on EU citizens (which is virtually all websites in the modern world).

Of course, it is not possible to monitor each and every one of the websites on the Internet, and I am sure that millions of unconscious webmasters will continue without making any changes (ignorance is a blessing).

But according to the law, the GDPR almost certainly applies to everyone.

How does the GDPR protect WordPress websites?

The GDPR has implications for the main WP GDPR FIX software. And most WordPress sites will probably use some add-ons or features included in the GDPR.

If you do not allow public records on your site, you may think that you do not collect data from your visits, but I bet you do.

These examples include:

Comments on your site (WordPress records the email address, IP, and name, did you know that?)

User records (obviously)

Contact form entries (especially if this information is stored in a database)

Any analysis tool that you are using

 

Basically, it affects you if you collect any type of data, even involuntarily (as in the comments).

Is WordPress doing something about the GDPR?

As you can see in the previous list, some of the things that could affect your site through the GDPR are in fact the central functions of WordPress.

To address this, the core WordPress team is working on how to develop GDPR compliance in the main WordPress software.

Discussions include adding tools to the core to help webmasters comply with the GDPR, as well as documentation for WordPress webmasters and how they should do to comply with the GDPR.

Furthermore, it is not only the central team that needs to pay attention to the GDPR. Plugin developers must also take responsibility for making their plugins compatible.

Responsive plugin developers are already doing this. For example, many add-ons for contact forms have pages with GDPR compliance.

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