What is GDPR Compliance: Guide to make your Magento Store GDPR Compliant

What  is Magento GDPR?

The web data holds great importance these days. There was never a time when the data was this valuable. But today, every single business, small or large scaled, process some kind of personal data on everyday basis. The Internet has many positive impacts on our lives, but on the other hand it has certain bad aspects too.

Among which, the most vulnerable is the data theft which leads to the loss of personal privacy, leaving you at risk of non-trustworthy individuals, companies and even national security agencies. Hence, data protection has become a major concern these days. But, fortunately, now there exists a law that addresses this major concern of data theft and provides protection from thieves and their evil intentions.

This law is called the General Data Protection Regulation. It was established back in May 2018. This law provides an ability to the users to erase, restrict and review their personal information.

For every E-commerce platform, its customers are the first priority. The customer should be made feel secured. In order to achieve this, it is very important to keep the customer’s data protected and secured. In this huge E-commerce world, where every system is coming up with promising features to attract their customers’ attention, Magento web design has never lagged behind in the race.

Magento GDPR Compliance

Magento eCommerce platform is one of the famous open-source E-commerce platforms, written in PHP. Magento has timely introduced many efficient extensions that have always proved to be extensively useful. Magento GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is one of the many.

Magento GDPR extension is designed to help online stores observe the latest legislative EU requirements and ensure data security and privacy. By using the Magento GDPR extension, customer data can be stored and processed in the most efficient way. In a way that fully satisfies the data protection regulation terms. Magento GDPR has considerably intensified customer privacy.

What is GDPR?

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a fundamental part of Europe’s digital privacy legislation. This European Union framework refers to all organizations in all member states and holds great significance for various businesses and individuals across Europe and even beyond.

General Data Protection Regulation is one significant matter that should be considered by every company selling on the web. Penalties for violating GDPR are extremely high and hence should be avoided. GDPR puts legal obligations for maintaining and processing customers’ personal data records. GDPR has extended the definition of personal data so that anything like an IP Address can be considered as personal data.

It also incorporates sensitive personal data such as genetic data and biometric data that can be used to uniquely identify an individual. Data forgery happens inevitably. Confidential data gets lost, stolen or sometimes released into the hands of people having malicious intent.

Organizations that operate under the terms of GDPR, ensure that the personal data of their customers is gathered legally and under strict conditions. Also, those who collect this information are responsible for insuring the protection of the information from exploitation and misuse. GDPR has mainly two targets:

• To assure that the private information of the customers is managed with caution and care.
• The customer information flow to other countries and regions should be safe without any obstacles.

GDPR provides the following benefits to stores:

• The GDPR allows stores to avoid penalties by observing users civil rights.
• Gain customers’ loyalty and commitment by protecting their personal information.
• Customer information can be collected in a transparent and secure way.

How Magento Complies with GDPR?

Magento has provided a detailed Data Processing Agreement affirming commitment to GDPR that ensures the protection of every potential customer information.  Magento GDPR allows customers to control and manage their personal information, i-e: the customers can request the businesses to remove their personal information in some cases.

Data handlers like Controllers and Data Processors in Magento help in proper data handling. Data Controllers deal with how the customers’ data is collected and used. Whereas, Data Processors highlight Magento features of processing customers’ data in controllers direction. Data Controller refers to a person, organization or an agency that decides the purpose and mode of processing personal information.

Whereas, the Processor is any person, public authority or an agency that processes data on the behalf of the controller. To work as a Data Processor, Magento has offered vast security capabilities and a robust architecture. These guaranty that no significant adjustments are required to enable Magento GDPR compliance.

Magento has always worked very closely with the legal experts to access the Magento products. It focuses on assisting the clients efficiently and determining what personal information is stored and where it resides. As a Magento store owner, it is very important to assure the customers that their personal information is secured from external threats.

The following points clearly elaborate the Magento GDPR Compliance:

• Magento GDPR allows customers to control and manage their personal information, i-e: the customers can request the businesses to remove their personal information in some cases. Magento GDPR extension can delete the customers accounts and the information associated to them. However, the information related to the orders, invoices, shipments and credit memos can’t be removed.
• The Magento GDPR Compliance provides another amazing feature of anonymizing the customer information on request.
• Another feature provided by Magento GDPR is that the admin can easily view the requests, either for deleting or anonymizing the account, made by the customers in the grid format. These requests can be then accepted, rejected or deleted by the admin.
• Magento GDPR notifies both; the customers and the admins. A notification is sent to the administrator when a request is made by the customer. Likewise, a notification is sent to the customer when the request is approved, deleted or rejected by the admin.
• The Magento GDPR compliance provides an ability to automatically respond the customer requests. When a customer make a request for anonymizing or deleting the account by clicking onto the send request button, immediately a success validation message is displayed and the account is anonymized.
• Magento GDPR allows stores to create or modify their privacy policies and decide the display positions on their websites.

Checklist to Keep your Webstore Magento GDPR Compliant

There is a list of things that can help you to keep your store Magento GDPR compliant:

• Add Cookie Consent Toolbar:

A toolbar to be placed on the website to take consent of the potential customers before using their personal information. The customers should know that a third party tool is being used that require cookies to work.

• Data Access:

This means that the customers should have a right to ask for a copy of their personal data that is being held on the store. In accordance to GDPR, the information such as Quote, Quote Address, Order, Order Address, Customer, Customer Address, etc. should be made available within 30 days of the request without a charge.

• Update Your CMS Pages:

Your data protection policy and terms and conditions must be updated with respect to GDPR compliance and must be accessible from every single page of your Magento Website. The customers should know what information is being collected, how is the data going to be used and with whom is the information going to be shared.

• Ability to Delete or Anonymize Data:

The customers and the admin must have a right to delete and anonymize their personal information stored in Magento store on request.

• Perform Security Testing:

Make sure that the Magento installation is up-to-date are the security vulnerabilities are known by exploring the Magento Security scan and Mage report. Penetration testing should be done in order to identify potential threats.

• Clear Privacy Policy:

In order to make your site GDPR compliant, it is very necessary to have a clear privacy policy that must be easily understandable. Customers should be asked for their consent before collecting their information. The reason for collecting customer information should be clearly specified. The customers should be able to withdraw from the consent anytime.

• Encrypt the Collected Information:

Ensure that the customer data being collected is stored in the databases in an encrypted form.

• Ability To Withdraw from a Subscription :

The customer should be given a right to opt in or opt out from any subscription at any time, i-e: If a customer doesn’t want to receive emails anymore, he should be given an option in the email to unsubscribe from email notifications.

Conclusion:

Hence, it is very important for every Magento store owner to develop an efficient plan that complies with GDPR and follows the respective rules. These rules may seem to be strict and difficult to implement but they can provide much easiness for storing and processing the customer data transparently.

Magento GDPR extension assists in attracting more customers, increasing sales and avoiding penalties. In short, Magento GDPR Compliance helps you to achieve your goal more quickly and efficiently.