GDPR Compliance Challenges & Their Practical Solutions

The strict approach of GDPR towards personal data necessitates businesses to play by the book to achieve compliance. Oftentimes, they face GDPR compliance challenges while trying to implement security measures and privacy principles. Due to its extensive scope, stringent obligations, and hefty non-compliance penalties, it is pertinent to identify solutions to these challenges.

This blog explores how to address GDPR compliance challenges and offers practical solutions. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been a game changer in the privacy-legal landscape. In addition to businesses based in Europe, the regulation has an extraterritorial application and applies to businesses outside the EU that offer products or services to EU citizens or monitor their behaviour. 

The arrival of this intricate EU data privacy regulation caused a global impact in streamlining the processing of personal data. Personal data means information that is capable of identifying individuals and includes but is not limited to:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Home address
• Health information
• IP address
• Location
• Religious beliefs
• Biometric data

Complying with GDPR regulatory requirements and implementing a privacy-by-design approach is a significant challenge for businesses. This includes data mapping, data minimization, purpose limitation, transparency, secured cross-border transfer, and more. 

Let us uncover the top 10 GDPR compliance challenges and discuss their solutions.

Running a business is a multidimensional process involving several crucial elements, including data privacy. You must be aware of the legal requirements to understand the compliance strategies and take action. 

GDPR gives data subjects/individuals authority over their personal data and empowers them with privacy rights such as the right to access, correct, erase, portability, restrict, object, and automated decision-making rights. Among all, the right to be forgotten is considered the greatest challenge in the United Kingdom. 

The law also imposes several obligations upon businesses, the most difficult of which is keeping records of processing activities and implementing privacy-by-design principles. 

Other obligations include:

• Having a lawful basis for processing
• Responding to data subject requests 
• Maintaining transparency
• Implementing data security measures
• Consent management
• Adequacy in cross-border transfer
• Conducting impact assessments 
• Notifying authorities of any breaches

Solution

The first-hand solution to overcome the legal awareness challenge is to create awareness. Grade yourself based on your position as a data controller or data processor regarding this topic. 

Consult a legal expert or appoint in-house legal associates for advice on the GDPR compliance strategies. Appointing a Data Protection Officer (DPO) is only necessary if you handle a significant amount of personal data/special categories of data. However, you can consider appointing one as a safety measure.

GDPR mandates businesses to safeguard personal data and maintain its confidentiality. Furthermore, extra caution is essential for special categories of personal data due to its sensitive nature. This is where the next compliance challenge surfaces- Data mapping.

To comply with the data protection requirements, you must identify the data flow within your organization. However, this presents critical challenges. Some of them are given below:

Data tracking: Many organizations find it difficult to track the data inflows and outflows. Since you receive data from different platforms like mobile applications, websites, third parties, etc, mapping the data becomes an exhausting task.

Dynamic nature: The dynamic nature of the data environment such as data sources and processing activities makes it difficult to track the flow. 

Lack of resources: It is often a hurdle to find the right tool and to allocate enough time, effort, and resources for tracking, categorizing, and maintaining data flow. 

Solution

You may conduct regular audits to discover any new data and their sources within your organization. Also, consider using data discovery and categorization tools, and automated data mapping tools. Ensure that you have a specialized team for this. 

Unlike US data privacy laws like CCPA, the GDPR follows an opt-in model. To achieve compliance, businesses must obtain data subjects’s consent before processing their personal data. This includes the use of online forms, opt-in checkboxes, consent pop-ups, etc.

In the digital realm, the introduction of GDPR has caused a surge in the significance of cookie consent. Here are some of the challenges that businesses usually face:

• Cookie categorization: Websites utilize various categories of cookies for different purposes, such as personalizing user experience, load balancing, and targeted advertising. Because of the legal constraints, businesses must obtain user consent before deploying non-essential cookies on devices. 
  
  A challenge they often face here is to identify the cookies that their website uses and categorize them.
  
• Obtaining consent: As per GDPR, businesses must obtain specific consent from users. This extends to digital data as well. 
  
  Websites must obtain consent for each cookie category to deploy non-essential cookies. To obtain valid consent, websites rely on cookie banners which involves spending a lot of your time and effort on coding.

• Auto-block third-party cookies: With the advent of GDPR, targeted advertising requires explicit user consent. Therefore, businesses must block third-party cookies on user devices until they obtain user consent, which is often a challenging task.

• Keeping consent records: In addition to obtaining consent, documenting and maintaining user consent records is pivotal to demonstrating GDPR compliance.

Solution

Ensure compliance with GDPR consent requirements, obtain specific consent, and avoid bad practices such as using pre-checked boxes or deploying non-essential cookies without user consent. Inform users about the purposes of using their personal data before obtaining consent.  

Conduct cookie audits and categorize cookies to ensure website GDPR compliance. Tools like CookieYes cookie checker are reliable and easy to use.

To simplify the process of providing cookie banners, you can go for cookie consent solutions like CookieYes. By integrating the CookieYes consent tool with your website, you can also automatically block third-party cookies before securing user consent.

CookieYes also helps you with documenting cookie consent by maintaining a consent log, making GDPR compliance much easier than ever.

Conducting a data protection impact assessment is a complex and continuous task. For this, you have to identify and determine the high-risk data elements within your organization and conduct in-depth assessments to find out data processing risks, all while ensuring that you have considered the whole database of your organization. This requires dedicated time, expertise, and effort. Above all, you have to find risk-mitigation measures which is the ultimate aim of the whole process.

Solution

The first solution’s roots go back to data mapping—understanding the data flow and categories maintained by your organization. To achieve a successful impact assessment, consider using automated tools, checklists, expert advice, etc. Establish and implement a DPIA policy for your organization. Allocate time and resources, including a team with members from different backgrounds, such as technical, legal, cybersecurity, etc.

GDPR requires businesses to be transparent about their data practices to users. This obligation is mostly carried out by providing privacy and cookie policies/notices containing legally prescribed information.

Drafting a compliant privacy notice or cookie notice that meets the GDPR standards can be challenging. The challenge stems from the complexity of data processing activities, accessibility requirements, the need to avoid technical and legal jargon, and the necessity of aligning with user expectations. You have to provide clear and easy-to-understand information about what you do with customer data. Moreover, it requires regular updations, at least once a year.

Solution

Provide your customers with policies that contain layers of information, such as the introduction, categories of data, third-party details, etc. Place them conspicuously on your website so that users can find them easily. Stay aware and updated on the legal requirements. You may also consult legal professionals and use compliance tools.

Drafting, publishing, and keeping the policies up-to-date require substantial effort. But what if you could streamline the process using a simple tool?

CookieYes offers free tools to generate custom privacy and cookie policies that comply with GDPR requirements. Our user-centric approach makes the policies user-friendly, understandable, and legally updated.

Because of strict regulatory requirements, organizations need to be cautious when transferring personal data internationally. The GDPR does not consider most countries to have adequate data protection, raising concerns for businesses to carefully implement data protection measures.

Due to the evolving adequacy criteria, cross-border data transfer has become challenging.

Solution

Ensure the adequacy of the country to which you transfer data. Implement alternative measures such as contractual clauses for data protection, seek legal advice, and implement data protection measures such as encryption during transit.

GDPR requires businesses to have a streamlined process for fulfilling data subject requests promptly. This ensures that their rights are protected and can be properly exercised. For this organizations must pay individual attention to each data subject request for correction, access, deletion, objection, etc, which can get tiresome. Furthermore, it poses challenges such as identity verification and mitigating fraud risks.

Above all, overcoming all the challenges while complying with the requests within the time constraints is itself a challenge, especially when there is a large number of requests awaiting response. 

Solution

Organizations can address these compliance challenges by implementing suitable processes and mechanisms, having a robust verification system, and allocating adequate resources for complying with the data subject requests.

Provide convenient mechanisms to submit requests such as a form, active email address, or a dedicated page.

To be GDPR-compliant, you must limit the collection of personal data to what is required for the specific purpose. Because personal data is available on a large scale, organizations often find it difficult to draw a line between what is necessary and what is not. It is equally important to ensure that the collected data is solely used for the purpose for which it was collected.

Solution

Review your data collection regularly and implement data governance policies within your organization. Moreover, training employees on the importance of data minimization and updating them on any changes in data management practices will also help in your organization’s journey toward GDPR compliance.

Organizations encountering a data breach must notify the supervisory authorities within 72 hours. This is often challenging, especially because of reputational risks, lack of coordination, and inability to detect the breach early. If you do not have a plan for dealing with data breaches, this is the sign to start one.

Solution

Coordinate an incident response plan for your organization. Train your employees in the appropriate steps to take in the event of a data breach and preventive measures to mitigate potential risks.

Additionally, it is crucial to have a breach notification template prepared to ensure a prompt and efficient response and avoid last-minute complications.

Non-compliance with GDPR can have serious consequences, including legal action, hefty fines, or warnings from Data Protection Authorities. The fines imposed under GDPR can result in significant financial loss, reputation damage, and operational disruptions. 

Note that GDPR has an extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning businesses outside the European Union must also comply if they handle EU citizens’ personal data.

Solution

The best solution is to be mindful of and adhere to the GDPR requirements. Watch for notifications or guidelines issued by the Data Protection Authorities on GDPR compliance. Implement privacy-by-design principles, constantly monitor your data practices, ensure transparency, and implement robust tools for compliance.