1 - Defradar - GDPR Implementation Guide v2
1 - Defradar - GDPR Implementation Guide v2
1 - Defradar - GDPR Implementation Guide v2
GDPR
GDPR IMPLEMENTATION
GUIDE
Defradar Co.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 2
1.1 The format of the Regulation .............................................................................................. 3
1.2 Definitions ...................................................................................................................... 3
1.3. Principles ........................................................................................................................ 4
1.4 Lawfulness ...................................................................................................................... 4
1.5 Consent ........................................................................................................................... 5
1.6 Rights of the data subject .............................................................................................. 6
1.7 Data Protection Officer .................................................................................................. 6
1.8 Data protection impact assessments ............................................................................ 7
1.9 Codes of conduct and certification ................................................................................ 7
1.10 International transfers ................................................................................................... 8
1.11 Supervisory authorities .................................................................................................. 8
1.12 European data protection board ................................................................................... 8
1.13 Remedies, liability and penalties ................................................................................... 9
2. Preparing for the GDPR .......................................................................................................... 9
2.1 Secure management commitment ................................................................................ 9
2.2 Plan your project .......................................................................................................... 10
2.3 Define Roles and Responsibilities ................................................................................ 11
2.4 Communication, awareness and training ................................................................... 12
2.5 Personal Data Inventory .............................................................................................. 13
2.6 Rights of the Data Subject............................................................................................ 14
2.7 Data Protection Impact Assessments .......................................................................... 15
2.8 Prepare for Personal Data Breaches............................................................................ 15
2.9 Collate records of processing ....................................................................................... 16
2.10 Review international transfers .................................................................................... 17
Whilst the emphasis is often on the rights of the data subject when discussing the
GDPR, it’s important to remember that the EC is also trying to make it easier for
organizations to share personal data and “oil the wheels” of business within the
EU, so it’s not as one-sided as often thought. However, there are a number of
important things to realize about the GDPR before we get into the detail.
Firstly, it concerns the personal data of EU citizens wherever that data is held.
This means that if your organization is not based in the European Union but has
customers (or suppliers or other parties) within it whose data you hold, the GDPR
applies to you.
Leading on from this, it means that if your organization doesn’t look after that
data in the way the GDPR requires, your organization may be subject to the
penalties that the Regulation allows. These penalties are a step change from
previous legislation and in serious cases, they are designed to hurt.
Thirdly, if you do experience a breach of personal data, you have no choice but to
tell the relevant supervisory authority about it. There are some caveats on that
which we will come to later, but keeping a serious data breach to yourself is no
longer an option.
But the mainstay of what the GDPR is about is forcing organizations to take the
protection of the personal data of EU citizens seriously.
The GDPR document itself is eighty-eight pages long and consists of two main
parts:
Recitals – 173 numbered paragraphs that lay out the principles and intentions of
the Regulation; if you like, the background.
Articles – the 99 sections that set out the detail of the Regulation – this is the part
that must be complied with.
1.2 Definitions
(7) ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or
other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and
means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such
processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the
specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State
law;
(11) ‘consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and
unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which he or she, by a
statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing
of personal data relating to him or her;
1.3. Principles
The GDPR establishes a number of principles that underpin the legislation and are
outlined using the following terms (with our quick summary given after each):
1. Lawfulness, fairness and transparency – keep it legal and fair; say what you’re
going to do with the data in clear terms
2. Purpose limitation – don’t do more with the data than you said you would
5. Storage limitation – don’t keep the data for longer than necessary
6. Integrity and confidentiality – keep the data safe while you have it
If you keep all of these principles in mind at all times, you’re unlikely to fall foul of
the GDPR.
1.4 Lawfulness
For the processing of personal data to be lawful, it must meet at least one of a
number of criteria, and an important first step in considering your processing
activities is to clearly establish which of the criteria applies in any given situation.
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In essence, the criteria to choose from with regard to the lawfulness of the
processing are as follows:
So, whilst consent is an important aspect of the GDPR, it’s not the only way in
which collecting and processing personal data can be lawful. In fact, you may find
that a significant proportion of the personal data your organization holds and
processes doesn’t require consent; instead it is required for lawful purposes such
as providing support to customers (contractual), paying employees
(contractual/legal) or dealing with the tax authority (legal). The process of
obtaining and maintaining consent may involve changes to business processes
and systems so it is a good idea to make sure there is no other lawful basis on
which processing can take place first.
1.5 Consent
If you believe that your processing is lawful because you have the data subject’s
consent, then you must be able to prove it. You can’t hide the consent wording in
amongst other contractual ramblings and expect to get away with it either. It
must be in an “intelligible and easily-accessible form, in clear and plain language”
(GDPR Article 7, paragraph 2) otherwise the consent doesn’t count and your
processing could be judged to be unlawful.
Once given, the consent can be withdrawn at any time by the data subject and
this must be as easy to do as it was to give it in the first place. A child must be at
least sixteen years of age to be able to give consent (younger if a member state
decides so, with a lower limit of thirteen) otherwise parental consent must be
obtained.
The GDPR establishes a set of rights that the data subject can exercise and which
the controller holding their personal data must react and respond to, generally
within a month.
These rights follow on from the principles that we discussed earlier and are aimed
at ensuring that personal data is processed fairly and transparently and that the
data subject can do something about it if this doesn’t happen.
Depending on your organization and what it does with personal data, you may or
may not need a data protection officer. You will have to designate one if:
The data protection officer is the main contact with the supervisory authority
and is likely to get involved when key issues of data privacy and protection are
addressed within the organization, such as during data protection impact
assessments.
The data protection officer will need to know a reasonable amount about data
protection law in order to fulfil the role.
In order to establish a culture where data privacy is “baked in” to new processes
and systems, rather than added as an after-thought, the GDPR requires that data
protection impact assessments be carried out where the risks involved to data
subjects are reasonably felt to be high. This process involves understanding the
personal data involved and addressing likely risks through the use of appropriate
controls, so that proactivity, rather than reactivity, is the order of the day.
The regulation makes provision for member states, industry bodies and other
organizations to create relevant codes of conduct and certification schemes that
can be used to encourage and demonstrate compliance. It’s early days for such
schemes, but they are likely to increase in popularity and availability as time goes
by, so it’s well worth keeping eye on what’s happening in your country and
industry.
Sending the personal data of European citizens outside of the European Union
raises questions over how well the data will be protected and the GDPR places
restrictions on how this may be done. To be helpful, the European Commission
regularly decides which countries it trusts to look after EU personal data and
publishes a list of those deemed to be acceptable. Currently, it’s a small list so you
may need to look at the other ways to meet the GDPR if you need to do
international transfers.
If you’re going to use binding corporate rules, be aware that they have to be
approved by the relevant supervisory authority and that can take a while. There
are a few get-outs (or “Derogations” as the GDPR calls them) for small, infrequent
transfers so it may be worth checking the list in Article 49 if time is not on your
side.
Each country within the EU will have a supervisory authority which is responsible
for overseeing the operation of the GDPR in that country. Generally, these already
exist and will not change. However, if your organization is outside of the EU but
wishes to process the data of EU citizens in several countries, you will need to
choose the most appropriate supervisory authority to act as the lead for your
organization.
The GDPR establishes the European Data Protection Board to oversee the
application of the Regulation in the members states. Each supervisory authority
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has a seat on the Board, together with the head of the European Data Protection
Supervisor. The Board will produce an annual report to tell us how well it’s going.
And so we come to the teeth of the Regulation; the fines that can be levied for
non-compliance with the GDPR are certainly larger than those for the Directive it
replaces. The actual amounts demanded will depend upon a wide variety of
factors, including the personal data involved, how hard the culprit organization
tried to protect the data, how much they co-operated with the investigation and,
most importantly, the specific article(s) of the GDPR they are judged to have
contravened.
Fines allowable are up to 2% of global turnover or ten million euros for lower
level infringements and up to 4% of global turnover or twenty million euros for
more serious cases.
Data subjects can lodge a complaint with the relevant supervisory authority
directly themselves or may use the services of a not-for-profit body active in the
field of data protection.
The first questions top management are likely to ask about the project are
probably:
Probably the most important point is that compliance is not optional and the
potential fines are big. Senior management support for the project may be
demonstrated by publishing a letter/memo similar to the Executive Support
Letter we have already provided as an example.
The accompanying workbook Compliance Evidence shows you how the various
documents included in our report, map onto the requirements and what other
evidence may be appropriate to show compliance. This may help when deciding
whether a requirement is met or not.
In order to quantify how much work may be involved in complying with the
Regulation, a GDPR Gap Assessment Tool is provided.
This summarises the key points of the relevant sections of the Regulation in
question form and is intended to give you a reasonable idea of where your
compliant and non-compliant areas are.
Roughly two thirds of the articles in the GDPR are aimed at bodies other than an
organization trying to comply so they aren’t really requirements that you will
need to worry about; these cover tasks such as the setting up of the European
Data Protection Board, certification schemes and the rules that the supervisory
authorities in each member state must follow.
Having secured top management commitment, you will now need to plan how to
achieve GDPR compliance. Even if you’re not using a formal project management
method such as PRINCE2® we would still recommend that you do the bare
essentials of defining, planning and tracking the implementation effort as a
specific project.
It’s important to establish from the start who is going to do what, both within
your initial project to comply with the GDPR, and for the long-term protection of
the personal data that you hold. The provided document GDPR Roles
Responsibilities and Authorities sets out various roles, including an information
security steering group to oversee the way in which data protection is controlled,
an information security manager and, most importantly, information asset
owners who have the most day-to-day involvement with the data in question. If
not already allocated, decisions need to be taken about who will fulfil these roles,
including potential recruitment.
The only role that is explicitly mandated in the GDPR is that of the data protection
officer (DPO). As we mentioned in 1.1.7 above, you may or may not need to
appoint one of these. If you’re a public body there’s no decision to be made, but
otherwise you may need to get views from different perspectives within the
business about whether you handle personal data on a scale that might be
considered large. Your supervisory authority may be able to advise, either directly
or via their website, if you’re unsure about this.
If you do need a DPO, you’ll need to decide whether to appoint internally, share a
resource with one or more similar organizations, or to contract a service from a
third party. Make sure the person that is appointed has the relevant competence,
One of the other points you may need to clarify is the supervisory authority that
you will report into. For single-country organizations within the EU this should be
a straightforward matter, but if your organization is based outside the EU or you
operate across borders within the EU, there is a decision to be made about who
will be your lead supervisory authority. Remember that you will need to be able
to justify this choice, based mainly on where you do business the most, but there
may be some flexibility if you have a preference.
Once you’ve initiated your project and defined who will perform which role, there
is a lot of value in raising general awareness about the GDPR and information
security in general so that people know what it is and why it’s important.
Audiences will include various stakeholders such as suppliers and contractors as
well as employees and it’s useful to create a managed programme of
communication so that it happens regularly.
You also need to identify the training needs of the people that are taking on the
various roles involved in achieving compliance on an ongoing basis. This may be
done by defining what competences are required and then conducting a
comparison exercise by questionnaire to find the gaps; these may be filled via a
combination of formal and informal training, including courses, webinars,
seminars, books and, of course, reading the Regulation itself. Training may
typically be needed in areas such as data mapping, data protection impact
assessments and incident management.
Once your people are in place and they’ve received some training, the next step is
to do some analysis of the way in which personal data is currently collected,
stored, processed, transferred and disposed of within your organization. There
are many ways to represent this but most come down to drawing diagrams of the
flow and recording the relevant information on a spreadsheet.
You’ll need to involve the people who are responsible for collecting and
processing the data on a daily basis to ensure that as full a picture as possible is
obtained. You could do this by arranging workshops and using whiteboards and
sticky notes, or you could send them a spreadsheet and ask them to complete it,
or you could do both; whatever fits the culture of your organization.
What’s key here is to understand the main facts such as the data items that are
being collected, for what purpose, by what method (e.g. on the website, face to
face, paper form), where, how and for how long the data is stored and where it
gets sent to. This will help in identifying any additional controls that need to be
applied to it (such as encryption) and in establishing the legal basis under which it
may be collected and processed (e.g. consent, contractual).
This Assessment/Guide provides some help with this exercise in the form of a
Personal Data Asset Inventory which is intended to be used to record an overview
of all of the personal data you hold, a Personal Data Capture Form for use when
looking at individual projects or business processes, a template for a Personal
Data Mapping Diagram if you prefer to use a diagrammatic representation of
your data and a Personal Data Flow Mapping Tool which can be used to
document the journeys the personal data take both within and outside your
organization.
The overall approach you decide to take regarding data retention can be reflected
in the Records Retention and Protection Policy.
Making sure you allow the rights of the data subject to be exercised without
hindrance is an important factor in GDPR compliance, and one which may attract
the attention of the supervisory authority if not done properly. Although we
provide a form within the Assessment, the most effective way to allow the data
subject to access and maintain their personal data is likely to be via some form of
portal that the user can log in to via the Internet and do it directly themselves.
Similarly, standard forms may be provided via such a portal for requests such as
objections and processing restrictions. You will need to make sure you have the
appropriate workflow behind the forms to ensure they are logged correctly,
processed by the right people within the required timescales and that the identity
of the requester is confirmed.
Some requests will require decisions to be made and sometimes these will not be
straightforward, so having a clear process and roles will be important – see the
Data Subject Request Procedure in the provided Templates.
You will also need to consider the best way to communicate your privacy notice
to the data subject, making sure that it covers the information required by the
GDPR. We peovide a procedure and a planning form for this purpose. Again, the
best ways to do this will depend upon how you interact with your data subjects
e.g. via the Internet, telephone, face to face.
This is a relatively new area for many organizations, but one which is clearly
mandated by the GDPR. New projects and significant changes to existing
processes will need to carefully consider the impact on personal data as part of
their assessment and planning, with appropriate controls put in place, based on a
fair assessment of risk. If you have a projects process, then this will need to be
added to it; the GDPR states that this is necessary only where there is a high risk,
but you may find that it is a good idea to perform these assessments as a matter
of course for every project.
The general consensus within the information security industry nowadays is not if
an organization will suffer a security breach, but when; and it may already have
happened, but you just don’t know about it. So, having an appropriate and tested
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incident management procedure is a must. The procedure offered as a template
is a good starting point for incidents affecting not only personal data, but for a
range of information security events, including denial of service attacks and
ransomware.
The GDPR insists that your supervisory authority be told about known breaches
that represent a high risk to data subjects and is specific about the timescales and
the information that must be provided. We provide a notification procedure, form
and register which should help to speed things up if the worst does happen.
Your supervisory authority could at any time ask to see records of the processing
of personal data that you carry out, so it’s a good idea to be clear from the outset
about where this information is to be found. We suggest keeping a spreadsheet of
the main items of information, but you also need to be aware of the records such
as logs and audit trails that exist at a lower level, reflecting the detail of what was
done when.
The full picture for GDPR purposes will consist of a wide variety of items such as
data protection impact assessments, privacy notices, subject request registers,
data mappings and risk assessments, which together reflect how seriously the
protection of personal data is being taken within the organization. This will
become particularly important in the event of a data breach when the supervisory
authority comes to decide the level of penalty that might be appropriate.
As well as protecting personal data within your own organization, you also need
to think about where else you send it to, and how well it is protected there. This is
an involved area and could either be a long, protracted affair or a simple, timely
one, depending on how well the requirements of the GDPR are understood. The
first step is to know what data you send where, and why. You then have various
options available to apply to the transfer, depending on factors such as the
destination, type of data and the purpose. We provide a Procedure for
International Transfers of Personal Data to help you to pick your way through
this puzzle and understand what needs to be done.