GDPR and your website: 5 blogs you need to read

Now that Meta has received another fine for data breaches in the EU, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has moved back to the top of everyone’s to-do list.

Websites operating in the EU have to comply with legislation such as GDPR and the e-Privacy Directive. And it is possible to get it right, even in a world where even large companies with massive IT and legal departments such as Meta can’t seem to protect people’s privacy.

If this is a topic that interests you, then the following five blogs are a must-read. They address topics such as keeping data secure, ensuring your website is compliant, the ins and outs of a cookie-monitoring platform, data creep and third-party tracking scripts.

GDPR will be familiar to many people, at least in name. One of its tenets is that any data you hold on people must be stored securely.

In practice, this means ensuring your website and systems are secure.

This blog on web security was written by Managed Services Director Anthony Lindsay, who examines what is involved in securing the data you collect – from ensuring that both server and application software are up to date, to limiting the number of people who have access to the data and ensuring it is inaccessible to robots and crawlers.

When was the last time you checked what cookies are set by your website? Our Data Protection Officer Maeve Dunne outlines five steps to ensure GDPR, ePrivacy and cookies compliance. She calls it “the five step transparency framework”.

If you need to access website data while staying on the right side of legislation, then Cookiebot could be the tool for you. It enables you to track potential customers without a privacy issue.

In this blog, Anthony sets out how Cookiebot works and why it is so popular.

Did you know that any data you collect is your responsibility? You need to know where it is at all times.

If you collect customer, prospect, or employee data, or give individuals the opportunity to have their say on your website, you need to ensure you track it, react to it, then make a conscious decision to use it or (securely) lose it!

Maeve outlines the concept of data creep, and exposes the secret hidey-holes for data.

It seems like a good idea to add JavaScripts and tracking code to a website. They can boost functionality, give a site cool features and feed back all sorts of data.

But they may also affect other areas of your site, like performance and GDPR compliance.

Director of Technology Alan Burke unpacks how these third-party scripts can do more harm than we realise.

When it comes to website data and security there are no halfway measures – data is either safe or unsafe; a site is either secure or unsecure.

The first step to keeping data safe and a website secure is a site health check. Like a regular doctor’s check-up, this assessment will give site owners a good indication of the health of their website and its ability to keep its users safe.

It can also turn up any red flags so that any potential issues can be stopped before they become a real problem.