Companies big and small have been rushing to embrace the new GDPR regulations that came into effect last Friday.  

What is GDPR and how it applies to your business?

GDPR stands for “General Data Protection Regulations” and is set of regulations on data protections for individuals residing in the European Union. As many aspects of our lives increasingly rely on our personal data collected and stored online, the EU has taken additional measures to protect individuals’ private data. 

Some of the requirements and rights outlined by GDPR include:

Obtaining consent from individuals before collecting personal data  

The right of individuals to access their personal information stored with the company 

The right for individuals to request that their data is deleted 

The requirement to notify users of any data breach in a timely manner, should such a breach occur.

If your business does not reside inside the EU, this regulation may still apply to you if your website can be accessed by visitors from the European Union. 

We encourage you to study up on GDPR requirements to make sure your business is in compliance. There are plenty of good resources online explaining GDPR, and we found this article especially useful as it translates every GDPR chapter and sentence into plain English with actionable advice.

In the meanwhile, we’ve added a few features to the Signalmind platform to make it easier for you to comply with the new GDPR regulations. 

Consent checkboxes 

One of the GDPR requirements has to do with obtaining explicit consent from users before collecting their personal information as well as clearly stating what information is being collected and how you intend to use that information. To make it easier to comply with this regulations we added a new Consent checkbox field into the Form widget. Add that checkbox above the Submit button and customize the explanation. (Users can’t submit the form without checking the checkbox).

An example of such consent explanation would be “By checking this box I agree to share my name and email address with you. I understand that you will use this data to respond to my inquiry.”

Cookie notifications

Some countries require that visitors are notified of the use of cookies when visiting a website. If this applies to you, we’ve added a cookie notification mechanism that will popup up when a site is visited. 

To enable cookie notification on a website, in the site dashboard click on the Settings icon and look for the Cookie Notification section. There you can enable the cookie notification and customize the text displayed to website visitors. 

Cookies are used on all sites created on the Signalmind platform, and the purpose of this is to gather statistics / reporting on the site visitors and interactions (such as unique visitors and page views).

Privacy Policy

We recommend that you create a privacy policy page for each website. There are a few privacy policy generators that you can use, here is a list of some of the popular ones.  Place a link to the site’s privacy policy in the footer of the site. 

We had also updated our Privacy Policy to make it easier for our users and site visitors to understand how we manage your personal data. For everyone’s convenience the privacy policy page is broken into a few sections: 

For visitors of Signalmind.com website

This section explains how we manage personal information collected from the visitors of Signalmind.com site. As our website is built on the Signalmind.com platform, the privacy policy there might be similar to most sites built on our platform. 

For users of the Signalmind.com platform

This section of our privacy policy has been compiled for the registered users of the Signalmind platform to explain how their personal information is being managed.

Privacy related to website builder features 

This section helps explain how personal information is collected based on the various scenarios and platform features.

Deletion of information

Per the GDPR requirements, individuals have a right to “be forgotten” (their profile deleted from the company’s database). To delete a contact or lead collected via a form, simply click the Delete icon next to the contact, and that contact record will be permanently removed from our database. 

If you have any questions regarding how the personal data is stored or managed on the Signalmind platform, please feel free to email us at [email protected].