What is Study Legal English doing to be GDPR compliant?
Introduction
With this blog post, we would like to explain what we have been doing to become GDPR compliant, so you can feel confident of our commitment to your data protection.
The European General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR, which enters into force on 25th May 2018 aims to regulate how personal data of individuals in the EU gets collected and used. Personal data means any information relating to you which someone could identify you with, such as your name and email.
Since the launch of Study Legal English at the end of 2017, we have been acting in line with the main principles of GDPR. However, we have recently updated our policies and practices to ensure that we are fully GDPR compliant. None of our practices have actually changed but we have rewritten our documents to make them more understandable for you. Here are the steps we have taken:
1. Updated our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions
The aim of Study Legal English is to provide you with Legal English services. Sometimes we need to collect your data so that we can operate and improve our service, for example Podcast Pro Membership and our newsletter. We only collect data we need for these purposes and we are not concerned with collecting any extra unnecessary data. This is why we don’t ask you invasive questions about your life when you sign up for our service, generally we only ask for your name and email address.
We recently updated our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions to state explicitly when we collect data, what data we collect, why we collect data, how we use it and what your rights are. We have written these documents in plain English to make them easier for you to understand.
You must agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions to become a Podcast Pro Member or sign up to our newsletter. However, if you have any problems with these documents you can let us know and you can also request to access the data we hold and for it to be deleted.
2. Required Opt-In for Newsletter
We updated our newsletter signup form so that subscribers must now opt-in to show that they have read and understand our Privacy Policy. There is a check box and users must physically check this box if they want to subscribe, there are no pre-ticked boxes.
Of course, as before, subscribers can click the unsubscribe button in their emails to stop receiving our newsletter and their data will be deleted.
3. Consent from existing users
We carried out a number of steps to ensure users of our website were aware of our new Privacy Policy. We put a notification header banner our website alerting users to our new Privacy Policy and asking for users to ‘opt-in’ if they agreed to this. We also put a notification in the Podcast Pro Membership dashboard asking them to ‘opt-in’.
We sent out an email campaign to Podcast Pro Members, users who had attempted sign-up as a Podcast Pro Member and newsletter subscribers, asking them to confirm whether or not they would like to ‘opt-in’ to our new Privacy Policy.
Following these steps, we are happy that most users opted in and we have kept a record of those users. However, on 25th May 2018, when the GDPR enters into force, we will be deleting the personal data for EU users who did not ‘opt-in’ and these users will have to sign-up again as a Podcast Pro Member or re-subscribe to the newsletter.
4. Questions
If you have any questions related to our privacy practices please get in touch – we are happy to help.
