GDPR for Sole Traders – Contacts and Communications
I’ve had variations of this question on contacts a few times since the first post, and I can understand the confusion around it. I’ve been asked by a few people whether lists you have of friends, family, or similar fall under GDPR (technically, yes, which is where the magic word ‘reasonable’ keeps coming in to play), and a lot of questions seem to be around the use of personal details for everyday business purposes.
Now, there’s various advice about legitimate interests as a basis for processing, notifications to send out to your address book and so on. When you are not collecting and processing personal data beyond contact details for clients, what needs to be done to be compliant?
The bad news, from one point of view, is that this is still personal data, it still falls under the act and therefore you need to think about what you are doing with it.
The good news is that it is extremely unlikely you need to do anything particularly special about it. The reason for this is that GDPR recognises two categories of data – personal data, and sensitive personal data. Sensitive personal data is personal data that relates to a protected characteristic. Normal personal data is personally identifying data which does not relate to a protected characteristic – an e-mail address or phone number would be personal data, but would not fall under sensitive personal data.
Unambiguous consent
The obvious question then is why it matters – and the answer is simple. Sensitive personal data requires explicit consent for any form of collection or processing – in other words to collect it or do anything with it, the data subject must be asked the question ‘do you agree to us collecting and holding this data for these purposes’, and a very definite yes is required from them for usage to be allowed.
Non-sensitive personal data (for want of a better term) requires only unambiguous consent. This means that they must have taken an affirmative action indicating their consent, but some aspects can be implied rather than having to be spelled out. So in the case of contact details, let’s say someone gives you a business card and says to get in touch. In that moment they have provided you with their personal data, and given you unambiguous consent to use it for the purposes of contacting them. The same would apply if they sent you an e-mail asking to start a business relationship, or picked up the phone.
However here’s where the whole purpose thing comes in again – while it is reasonable to say that someone who has given you their contact details and asked you to get in touch has given unambiguous consent for contact (or if you’re a larger company, and if you are we can talk consultancy fees or you can talk to your own GDPR experts, for one of your sales/relationship team to get in contact), they have not given consent to be signed up to your automated mailing list. If you think they might be interested in it, and want them to sign up, then get in touch and ask for their consent to use their data that way – then make sure you keep a record of that consent (saving an e-mail would count).
When someone makes personal data public it’s a slightly different matter. By having some of my contact details publicly available I am providing unambiguous consent to being contacted using them – although signing them up to an automated mailing list would be a different matter.
Please note that in this particular article, I am looking only at personal data used in an everyday business way, and what is reasonable to do with it. In terms of contacts and communications a sole trader is likely already compliant, unless they are carrying out some sort of automated marketing rather than handling things directly.
To sum this all up in some simple answers (and I still believe the GDPR can be summed up in a few sentences for the vast majority of cases, but that’ll come later):
- someone giving you their contact details is providing all the consent you need to contact them, but nothing else such as subscribing them to an automated list
- if you want to do anything other than contact them, then to be compliant you need to very clearly inform them of what you want to do and confirm that they consent to it
- you need to be very clear with people you contact on how they can ask for their data to be removed, and do so promptly if they ask
- take reasonable security precautions with these contact details (I would hope that most sole traders would consider them valuable enough to protect from disclosure in any case)
I’ve put together a quick and dirty tutorial on how to use one of the better encryption tools out there. I’ll go more into depth once I’m back at a real computer and have a little more time, maybe with a full video exploration and explanation of the different options. I’ll also be looking to do an evaluation of cloud storage options and how they play in to the situation. As always, if there are particular questions or particular urgent areas then drop me a line either here or on twitter (@coffee_fueled).
GDPR for Sole Traders – Brief Summary
There is a lot of advice floating around about the GDPR – for everyone from large enterprises to small business. What I haven’t seen much of (though I have seen some) is an attempt to relate it to self-employed or freelance individuals, sole traders, and small partnerships. Recently my wife came across some questions about it on one of her social media translator groups where there were concerns about how it will impact these groups.
The advice for SMEs and larger is generally very official, designed for consumption by the legal and technical teams of a company. That’s great for a company which has those, but doesn’t apply so much to a sole trader who doesn’t specialise in law and IT. So I offered to summarise as best I could, and translate things a little. Before I do that I need to make a couple of things clear:
- This post is aimed to make the GDPR understandable for sole traders and other small businesses, I do not aim to present or suggest solutions here, simply try and help to ensure that the responsibilities and duties are understood appropriately.
- This is not official advice from a lawyer or similar and you should not lean on it if you have a particularly complex situation, instead consult a professional who is willing to put official advice in writing and has liability insurance.
- This first post is a brief summary – I will be skimming over the legislation, as I don’t know which are the most pertinent questions to go into depth. If you have any questions please get in touch, or post a comment, and I’ll happy elaborate on any areas of confusion or concern.
Principles of the GDPR
The GDPR is based around a number of principles, largely building and elaborating on existing principles in data protection legislation.
- Lawfulness, fairness and transparency: treat personal data according to the law, fairly, and be open and transparent about your usage of it with the subjects of the data
- Purpose limitation: only collect and use data for clearly defined purposes, do not use it for anything outside of those purposes (transparency applies here, as the data subjects must be informed of the purposes)
- Data minimisation: you should only keep the most limited data you can which is adequate and relevant to your purposes in processing
- Accuracy: personal data you hold must be accurate, and where necessary kept up to date
- Storage limitation: this is more an extension from data minimisation – you must not hold data in a form that allows identification of subjects longer than necessary for your stated purposes, note that this permits anonymisation of data for further storage and processing
- Integrity and confidentiality: make sure that the data is secure, using (and this is the key word) appropriate technical or organisational measures
- Accountability: the data controller (different from the data processor, we’ll get to that) is responsible for and must be able to demonstrate compliance with the GDPR legislation
GDPR Data Subjects, Processors and Controllers
The other three key terms that come up in the GDPR are about who it applies to. Here we have data subjects, processors, and controllers. Subjects is fairly clear, it refers to the subjects of the data being gathered and their rights to control that data. Specifically their right to be informed of any data held on request, and their right to have it shown to them or removed on request. Processors and controllers are where some confusion comes in, but are quite simple. The controller is the one who decides what the data is to be used for, while the processor is the one who carries out those uses. For sole traders and other small businesses these are almost certain to be the same people – although there will be cases where they are not (where your business is about providing analytical resource and expertise to third parties, for example).
Contractual Basis for Processing
I’m going to end with this section, for now, as it is the area which seems to raise the most concern. As mentioned if anyone has questions around other areas, please get in touch or comment and I’ll happily expand this series to address them, but this I really wanted to cover.
One of the most common questions I have heard is whether the GDPR will interfere with normal business, in particular starting a new business relationship with someone. Do you need to e-mail them to get informed consent, keep them notified that you’ll be storing their contact details in your address book/CRM, and so on? Marketing is a bigger, separate subject, so if it’s asked about I’ll go into it in a separate post.
Essentially if you are holding and processing someone’s personal data for the purposes of fulfilling an agreed contract and/or agreeing a contract then you have a lawful basis for processing. Contract here refers to any agreement that meets the terms of contract law (not necessarily written down, but means that terms have been offered and accepted, you both intend for the terms to be binding, and there is an element of exchange).
The good news is that this will apply if you are establishing a relationship and contract with a new client. It will also apply if, as part of the contract, they are asking you to process their personal data (i.e. getting a personal document translated to another language). What is important is that when you obtain the data you ensure the client/customer/third party is informed on how you will be using it, why you will be using it, what you will be using it for and how long you intend to keep hold of it.
Basically a lot of the GDPR boils down to being transparent with people about what you are doing with their data, taking responsibility and accountability for data you hold, and acting in a reasonable manner. If you are clear and open with customers about what you will do with their data (and remember, GDPR is opt-in, not opt-out, so the consent must be informed and documented), and keep track of data assets you hold then you should be fine. There’s a lot of use in the legislation about ‘reasonable’ measures, views, expectations and so on. Essentially – if someone contacts you in order to set up a contract and do business with you, particularly if the only personal data you obtain are contact details, you will need to take reasonable security measures to secure those contact details, and not misuse them to send out marketing e-mails without the explicit consent of the data subject.
Treat other’s data as you’d expect a responsible business to treat yours, and you should be fine. If you have questions either around other aspects, or around more practical security matters for a sole trader or small business (encryption, systems to use, what counts as ‘secure’) then please do leave a comment or get in touch directly.
I’ve been advised to add a small note around some specific scenarios:
- if you are working with a document with a signature, even if there is no other personal data, then once you are finished with the document you should destroy it and/or ensure that the signature is unreadable (there may be reasons to keep the document, in which case it should be fully anonymised if you have no need of the data)
- if you keep contact details (you do) then you should ensure that people are informed you are keeping them, and make sure they have a way to ask for the data you hold on them, ask for changes, ask for it to be erased, ask you to restrict the purposes you use it for (with contact details this essentially maps to asking for it to be erased I imagine), ask for an electronic copy, and object to you holding it – this is a large area, and I suspect will involve a separate post to cover fully
- having a password on your computer is not a way to protect your data from theft unless you have also set up encryption, or are storing all data on the cloud rather than the local machine, or other circumstances which may apply – if I get some questions on this then I’ll go into more detail, but it’s fair to say that whole-disk encryption along with a password is a reasonable option, while an unencrypted disk is not