GDPR changes we’re working on: New GDPR ready plugins

What is GDPR and why does it affect you?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is legislation update made by European Union in order to tighten up the rules for data protection of EU citizens. This European regulation will affect millions of businesses, non-profit organizations and websites all around the world – not only in the EU. Why?

[READ: GDPR in a simplified infographics]

The reason why it affects (almost) everyone is that it’s not taking into account your location. It doesn’t matter if your company is based in the US or anywhere else outside the EU. If any of your web visitors or any of your customers is EU citizen, you’re obliged to comply with all of the GDPR requirements.

Are you collecting e-mails for newsletter or addresses for product delivery? You have to comply with GDPR.

Date when GDPR comes into effect is 25th May 2018.

Real life example of GDPR

When a personal information is being collected – e.g. e-mail required to fill in into the contact form or when you’re leaving a comment under a blog post, there has to be a clear reason stated why is this personal data required.

What are we preparing for our customers

In relation to the new legislation we’re working on several changes in our products, especially directory themes and directory plugins. These changes will allow you to update your websites easily in respect to GDPR rules for personal data protection.

One of the changes is update of Contact form element. We’re adding an editable help text to each input. You can use it to explain to your web users the necessity and reason for collection of their personal data. We’re also implementing changes into a Quick Comments Plugin. You’ll be able to insert text expressing the consent of data collection. Mailchimp integration will be added to the settings.

Quick Comments Plugin with help text

New GDPR ready plugins

In a next few days, we’ll be introducing new features to accommodate GDPR requirements:

• Infobar Plugin – customizable information bar on your website, which can be closed by a web visitor.
• Comments Extension Plugin – plugin will let you add text input to the WordPress comments.
• Ait Subscribe Form Element – element that you can use to add subscribe form anywhere on your website through the Page Builder. It will log the subscription activity of your web users.

We’ll be releasing our new GDPR friendly plugins one by one in a next few days so our customers can start working with them as soon as possible. In a meantime, we’ll be implementing all of the above mentioned changes into our directory themes and plugins up until 25th May 2018.