GDPR Compliance: 5 Early Steps to Get Laggards Going

If you're just getting on the EU General Data Protection Regulation bandwagon, here's where you should begin.

Sara Peters, Senior Editor

October 16, 2017

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Although the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in effect since 2016, and although enforcement actions kick off a mere seven months from now, many companies didn't really appreciate the magnitude of the new privacy legislation until the Equifax breach.

An American company exposed the sensitive private data of 700,000 citizens of the United Kingdom (still part of the European Union); "sensitive, private data" that is, by the American definition. The European Union's definition is significantly broader, and in all Equifax exposed 12.5 million UK clients' records. It is possible that European data authorities might do different accounting.

Monetary penalties for GDPR are up to 20 million Euros or 4 percent of annual turnover (similar to revenue), whichever is higher. Data privacy authorities can also ban companies from processing certain kinds of data entirely, which can massively disrupt entire business models. Organizations must also consider the costs of defending themselves in the many lawsuits that citizens and data authorities might bring against them.

With retributions like that looming overhead, it's no wonder that organizations are waking up to the importance of GDPR preparation. Here are a few places to start.

About the Author

Sara Peters

Senior Editor

Sara Peters is Senior Editor at Dark Reading and formerly the editor-in-chief of Enterprise Efficiency. Prior that she was senior editor for the Computer Security Institute, writing and speaking about virtualization, identity management, cybersecurity law, and a myriad of other topics. She authored the 2009 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey and founded the CSI Working Group on Web Security Research Law -- a collaborative project that investigated the dichotomy between laws regulating software vulnerability disclosure and those regulating Web vulnerability disclosure.


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