The 7 GDPR Principles

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Europe’s data privacy, information-security, and security law that has requirements that organizations must follow to operate in the European Union. It is the strongest privacy and security law in the world, and since any company that deals with people in the EU must comply with it, it is very important to know.

Within the GDPR, seven principles relate to how an organization can process personal information. These principles lay out the collection, organization, combination, restriction, erasure, and destruction of personal data.

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In this article, we will look at the seven principles and see how we can prepare our organizations to deal with them through GDPR training.

GDPR Principle #1: Lawfulness, Fairness, and Transparency

The first principle is that of lawfulness, fairness, and transparency. Lawfulness means that any processing of user data must meet legal requirements. Fairness regards how the collection of data should not be unexpected, misleading, or deceptive. Transparency relates to how a user can request the information kept on them and its purpose.

To learn more about these principles in the GDPR, you can enroll in an online course, such as the free courses offered by SC Training (formerly EdApp). There is a free course called General Data Protection Regulation for Individuals offered by SC Training (formerly EdApp). This course will teach you everything you need to know about how the GDPR affects businesses. 

GDPR Principle #2: Purpose Limitation

This principle of the GDPR relates to how personal data needs to be collected for specific, explicit, and legitimate purposes which are expressed at the time of their collection. This means the data cannot be used for a different purpose at a later time. However, it can be used for scientific, historical, or statistical purposes as long as it is in the public interest.

Since knowing exactly the right data that you need is important, it’s good to have good data-gathering skills. A free course to help you with identifying and preparing data is Preparing the Data, also offered on the SC Training (formerly EdApp) platform. It can help you learn the key skills for data analysis while taking advantage of all the features that a premium LMS has to offer.

GDPR Principle #3: Data Minimization

The third principle is that of data minimization. This has been put in place to ensure that only data that is adequate and relevant is collected. That means that organizations should not take any more data than they intend to use. This can help limit the amount of damage done if the data gets hacked or leaked. It also lessens the risk of further vulnerability from shared data with partner service-providers and the amount of unauthorized incidents.

Limiting the ways that you can have your data compromised can be aided by cyber security training. A good course to use for this is Cyber Security Awareness. This is designed for beginners and will get you ready to keep your organization free from hackers. You will learn about all the various types of attacks and what you can do to help prevent them.

GDPR Principle #4: Accuracy

The principle of accuracy means that organizations should make sure that their data is correct and up-to-date. This means that if they have incorrect or partially filled data on a user, the user can request that the data be updated in line with GDPR compliance. Furthermore, a user can request that their data be deleted. The organization must have clear procedures for incident responses for this.

GDPR Principle #5: Storage Limitation

The storage limitation principle ensures that an organization does not keep the data for longer than its intended purpose. It can only be stored for longer periods if it is done so in the public interest for scientific, historical, or statistical reasons. That means that personal data should be deleted as soon as possible once it is no longer needed.

There is also a requirement that, when possible, data should be anonymized. This should happen if the data does not need to be tied to an individual.

A similar topic is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), which aims to protect credit cardholder data. You can learn about this in the PCI-DSS Requirements course. This course lets you know how you can securely store sensitive information like credit cardholder information.

GDPR Principle #6: Integrity and Confidentiality

This principle is meant to ensure that collected data is kept secure and confidential. That means that it shouldn’t be lost in case of a data breach. An organization must take appropriate cyber security measures to ensure this principle. Adding measures of authentication, encryption, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing are among the data security standards required by most governments today. Additional compliance and security requirements include having an information security policy, pci compliance, and anti-virus software.

A more in-depth security course on SC Training (formerly EdApp) is Cyber Security. This course also goes over the most common cyber security threats to an organization, including viruses and social engineering. It also helps you develop an overall management strategy for your business, so you will be able to define a clear path towards having a secure organization.

GDPR Principle #7: Accountability

The final principle is that of accountability. It states that an organization must be able to show that they are capable of carrying out all the other principles. An organization will need to create its privacy policies, have its codes of conduct, and also report data breaches that occur to the public.

Utilizing an LMS like SC Training (formerly EdApp), you can easily make your policies known to all members of your organization. You can create your courses easily by using SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s drag-and-drop authoring tools. This also lets you enroll your employees in a course about your company’s policies.

Furthermore, you can easily add various types of content, such as videos or animations. Whenever you need to update something, you can notify all users directly to their mobile devices that there has been an update.

In this article, we looked at the seven principles of the GDPR. We saw the reasons for each one and we also saw how we can learn more about making our organization GDPR-compliant through a training LMS. Using prebuilt courses and also by creating our own, creating a learning organization in agreement with the GDPR is not an incredibly difficult task. So, what is your organization doing to make itself GDPR-compliant?