For quite some time now, businesses are getting ready for a new law called GDPR, which will be enforced on May 25th 2018.
The digital world has evolved a lot in 23 years: in 1995, only 1% of Europeans were using the internet and social media didn't even exist yet. But, one thing hasn't evolved since then; the European Union's directive on data protection.
To adapt to existing rules to our current digital world, the European Parliament voted a new regulation in April 2016: the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.
The main objective of this new regulation is to reinforce citizens' data protection but also to harmonise the different laws on that protection from the different European Union countries, into one single regulation.
As of May 25th, different aspects of this regulation will be applied, such as:
- Citizens will have to give their consent in an explicit way to businesses before they can use their data.
- Everyone can ask any business for their personal data to be erased.
- This regulation will be applied to all organisations, European or not, as soon as they process European citizens' data. This is one of the main changes since the previous law in 1995.
- Businesses in breach of the new GDPR rules will be fined.
In short, a whole list of rules forcing companies to adapt in order to meet these rules and at Spreds, we have integrated those recommendations in several ways:
- Spreds won't keep a member's personal data if this one wishes to leave the platform - unless this member is an investor, in which case, we will keep some legal information since we still have to comply with the Belgian crowdfunding law that makes us keep certain information linked to each transaction on our platform.
- Also, Spreds decided to decrease the amount of information required for the members.
- Finally, to increase data protection of our members, Spreds also decided to slowly remove unneeded third party services. For example, one of the initiatives we took is to end the login option via Facebook and LinkedIn (effective since April 9th), to increase the security of your account.
These are just some elements implemented by Spreds to increase the protection of your data and until May 25th, Spreds will continue its work in order to comply with these new rules.
Source : European Union website for GDPR