The burden of not tracking people is quite small.
"Complying with the GDPR is a huge undertaking"
"GDPR compliance (occupies) a huge amount of IT time and resources"
"Moving your organization into GDPR compliance is a process you ideally started long ago"
The article links to some ICO GDPR data processing checklist, which is a list of 18 different processes you need to have put in place.
"The GDPR is made up of 99 articles that provide a detailed description of the regulation". <- 99 different articles to understand and adhere to ...
"[I]t is impossible to provide an exact prescription that will guarantee your organization is in compliance"
"One of the most onerous obligations of the GDPR is to provide “Data Subjects” – the people whose data you are processing – with access to the data that you hold about them (Article 15)",
"They can also request rectification or completion of data if it is inaccurate or incomplete, and they can request that you delete their personal data"
"This is onerous because Data Subjects can make requests in writing or verbally, and you need to be able to comply with the requests “without undue delay"
^-- All that seems to go against your assertion that you just have to "not track them", if you have to build out a system for everyone to access all data you hold about them, rectify it, delete it, verbally or in writing, without delay.
I'm not even half way through the article and I'm skipping over tons of what it's saying needs to be done, with all the security measures that need to put in place, whether or not encrypted data is needed, breach notification, and so on.
It seems like a heck of a lot more than just "not track people", or a trivial amount of work.
If you don't track people's data, that "system" becomes an automated email reply with "we don't have any data about you".
But if you deal with individuals, probably you do want to collect at least some data that would be subject to the GDPR protections, and it is definitely easier to forget all about it.
The intent of the gdpr is that you think about all of this and not simply store everything to mine, have stolen, leak or sell later on. The problem is that many companies or the software they use is literally build to abuse that data so then it is indeed 'hard' and expensive to comply.
A reminder that we're talking about passing visitors without accounts here, and for logging and analytics there shouldn't be a need to store anything longer than a couple days.
Sure, you have to comply with data requests, but if you don't store/share it... that's also trivial.
This is 100% not true and would be a violation under the GDPR. You need not share any data and if you do nothing, you'd be violating the GDPR.
> Sure, you have to comply with data requests, but if you don't store/share it... that's also trivial.
Nope, this is also not true. At least, it's not just "data requests."
You are in violation of the GDPR.
> GDPR does not regulate “sharing,”
13.1.e requires at least the notification of the recipients of the data. With the requirement about the purpose of use, it effectively regulates sharing.
> since you must process IP addresses in order to serve a website
That's right and that places the IP in the 4.1.f "processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller" area which doesn't require consent.
The irony here is that the people who think they’re standing up for GDPR are actually the ones not taking it seriously, while the people who take it seriously are the ones who know what a pain it is to comply with.
That publisher's page lists the third party processors for the documents, (as expected) but not the hosting provider. I'd love to see a counterexample.
I’ll edit to add that the user must be notified that you are collecting and processing personal data, which includes IP address. And the hard part is that you must also have internal paper trails that prove that you have written that notification in full knowledge of all the data processing done on your behalf by all your service providers. Is a data center owner routing traffic to your server? You need paperwork in which they commit not to store the IP addresses of your visitors, for example. That is not public-facing but must be available to regulators upon their request.
That’s the hard part of compliance and what most people skip. They click OK on the standard agreements with service providers and put up a standard privacy template. That is not actually compliant but folks are essentially betting that they are small enough that data regulators won’t ever come call them on it.
That's complete nonsense.
It's a bit hyperbolic to say that you're, "not even half way through the article and I'm skipping over tons of what it's saying needs to be done", when you've literally only listed one thing.
I'm sure each case might be different, but I can't but help to think this is just a cheap excuse to inflate the work that is required ro comply with data Protection Regulation.
I've worked already on a few projects involving data protection, and they all boil down to two steps:
- only store anonymous data. No personal data? No problem.
- if you need to store personally identifiable information, support deleting it on request.
It might be easier to incorporate these requirements at the design stage, but by now this is a very basic set if requirements.
We need more of the world to implement similar rules so that it becomes infeasible to choose that option.