General Data Protection Regulations - GDPR and Waymark

Over the last few weeks, you would have been hard pushed to avoid the news and references to the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).  Certainly if you conduct any your life online, or belong to any mailing lists, you would have received a whole raft emails asking you to confirm your permission to receive continued marketing messages.

We wanted to write a brief post about GDPR from our own perspective and how we have made the necessary changes in terms of keeping our client’s safe and secure.

What Is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulations is a set of EU directives that came into force on Friday 25 May 2018 and they replaced the UK’s own data protection regulations from 1995.  The premise is to harmonise how companies use and share personal information. Specifically, this refers to any data that personally identifies an individual. So in our property world, a name and address identify an individual but an address in its own does not!

What Has Waymark Done About GDPR?

Luckily, as a new start business and having some of the latest property technology, there was not a huge amount that we needed to do.  We carried out an initial audit to help shape our new Privacy Policy [insert link] and use the various GDPR functions within our estate agency management software to ensure we are complying.  We have also been in contact with our main IT suppliers to ensure systems compliance.

We did say it was a brief post!  We think that GDPR is a good thing.  Whilst it has introduced an extra level of administration, it has forced all businesses to review how they handle information and rightly puts a value on the information we collect.