A short YouTube interview (Dec 18, 2019) where solicitor Sean Rogers and host Mark Simpson discuss practical steps for making websites GDPR-compliant. Key advice: secure your site with an SSL certificate, have a clear/privacy policy in plain language, disclose third-party services (CRMs, payment processors, PMS integrations), and prioritize transparency to reassure users and aid SEO.
Chapters
Solicitor. I grew up, I suppose in the law in the northwest doing claims and civil litigation. We all know about the, you know, the cold call on ppi, rta. Everyone's at them. So everyone can completely understand why data was of such importance at that level and cold call and nuisance calls. But then at the other end of the scale, and you're seeing stuff come out in the press today about Amazon, Google, loads of stuff to do with private health services, data being sold, information being sold, and everything's gone on with Cambridge analytics, all sorts of stuff really.
What I want to dial down to is maybe two of the most important places. As we're sort of talking on a marketing point of view, we're going to focus on website and emails. Now obviously there's a couple more avenues to go down, but I guess if anybody wants to find out more, come to my legal club and you can do that. But let's just focus on two things then. Website, let's focus on that. Dial down there to start off with what is the most essential thing that everybody needs to be doing if you've got a website in to be compliant with the gdpr.
First thing I would say in relation to any website nowadays is Google for SEO purposes, likes websites that are secure. You can get things like SSL certificates that are really, really cheap peanuts. Google likes them. That's where you'll get the green padlock in a browser. So you go on websites that are nice and secure, that's what you'll get. If you use quality companies with really good products and software within them for cyber security and so forth, then that's your starting point for your website. And I think with SEO, Google being so important, it's a no brainer to go through that strategy. So if you're not already done that, I'd have a chat with whoever you host your website with, I'd look at getting your SSL certificate in and check what protection measures they have in place there. I think your starting point would be to make sure that your privacy policy. So I think in your terms of use you can explain a little bit in there about you want people to use the website and do it in layman's terms, really our best, almost avoiding the law. In terms of the way that you explain this and that is part of the regulations. It's really important that lay people can read this.
Just to give you a bit of an insight in how short stay accommodation works. 99% of the time, everybody that's watching this or has has a business, whether it's an Airbnb, a hotel, a guest house, rental accommodation. It will be linked up to a third party, a property management system. Most popular ones, free to book a let Avivo. These are some of the big guys and all the payments are taken through there. So all of these guys are already got their compliance in place. So what you're saying, in essence is just make sure that whatever data is on your website is the same that is being sent to these PMSs, so to speak. Is that sort of what we're saying?
Yes. You use my legal club as an example. You know, I don't hide anything on that. If you go on the homepage, you'll see we work closely with Commodore security for SSL certificates. We use Salesforce as our CRM system and we integrate that with GoCardless. You know, we're on godless direct debit system. Just so in our terms of use, we basically explain we don't hold our card details, the membership information that you sign up for, we have to use that because we use WooCommerce as one of our commercial partners. So, yes, 100%. I would make sure on your website you explain all these things because remember, when people are. I think people get incredibly nervous about this over the next year because of the stories that are going to come out in the press. Morrison's going through an appeal at the moment to do with the GDPR issue. As I say, when news breaks about this other organization that have lost passports, utility bills.
I touched upon it and I just want to circle back to it. That SSL certificate is key as a starting point for a potential guest arriving on your website. If they land on it, Google now will have a top thing at the top left hand corner of the screen saying not secure. They click on that, it will say if you enter your information on here, it could be sensitive to hackers for a guest experience point of view. If you're thinking a customer point of view, who in their right mind would continue to go down the route of giving any sense of information through you, they'll bounce and they'll go to booking.com, they'll go to Airbnb, and then you're losing your direct booking, which is what we're all about here. Like cutting down the reliance on booking.com or Airbnb, getting them into your website and making that booking. So Sean's just given some fantastic little start off points there, and you may be thinking, shit, that is a lot to go through. But just focus on SSL certificate, making sure you've got a privacy policy and just being super transparent, whatever you do, just copy and paste what you see on one of these massive websites, because that's not how we do it. Quick question, then. Any tools or any apps or anything that you could recommend, Any standard stock policies? Do you have that? In my legal club, Anything that anybody can get hold of if they're thinking, I need to sort of get a bit of help on this before going into anything.
It's always worth, you know, dedicating half an hour to do some research yourself. That's the most important thing. No matter who. If you.
