A quick recap on the EU GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on May 25, 2018. And while we’ve already seen that big companies, like Google and Facebook, are under fire from data privacy advocacy groups - many small businesses are still struggling to understand how to ensure compliance.

At Mono, our commitment is to always provide small businesses with the best platform to efficiently run their business, and in the context of GDPR - this means reduce the time spent on administrative tasks related to making their website GDPR-compliant.

How Mono supports GDPR

As a European-based company, GDPR has been a top priority not only for us as a company (you can read a full outline of our efforts on our GDPR microsite), but also to ensure that our reselling partners and their small business customers live up to these new data privacy standards. From a platform perspective, we’ve made significant updates to ensure not only compliance, but also convenience when it comes to new functionality for data privacy. The main focus areas have been:

• Transparency: To help SMBs make their privacy policy more visible, we’ve made it easy to manage and display their privacy policy. This include the addition of a dedicated privacy policy field in Global Data, which allows SMBs to centrally update their privacy policy, and re-use it across their website. This is especially helpful with the addition of privacy policy links on forms, cookie notification, blog comments and more. 
• Consent: To support the right to consent, we’ve added consent options to everything that collects data. From simple forms to newsletter sign ups to blog comments, websites built on the Mono Platform can now ask and document user consent. By asking visitors to opt-in and ensuring documentation, SMBs can rest assured that they know when data was submitted and from where. 
• Right to be forgotten: We’ve always provided SMBs with the ability to delete entire user profiles and form submissions. Our new GDPR-specific features enable SMBs to delete specific piece of data (for example, just their phone number). 
• Right to data portability: The new Personal User Data Report functionality brings true convenience to SMBs faced with the new right to data portability. SMBs using the Mono Platform can now generate a report in just a few clicks, documenting all data collected on a specific user. This also saves time in the scenario that a visitor asks for all their data to be deleted, as SMBs know exactly which data needs to be deleted - instead of guessing where the visitor data may exist within their system. 
• Extra privacy regulations: In certain European markets, additional regulations have been put in place for added data privacy scenarios where data may be passively collected. Most notably, this primarily affects social media share modules, and we’ve therefore implemented a two-click solution - so SMBs can let visitors choose to enable social media share options.

More data privacy is coming

GDPR is just the latest initiative on data privacy, but it is not once and done. It’s an ongoing effort with more regulation in the pipeline. Therefore it’s becoming increasingly important that SMBs start taking a proactive approach to data privacy, now. It is expected that a new E-Privacy Directive (another legislation by the EU) will come into effect in 2019. To ensure that our platform continually supports the needs to make it easy and convenient for SMBs to comply with data privacy regulations, Mono is dedicated to continually monitoring developments in data privacy regulations around the world.