Like us, you’ve each no doubt received hundreds of emails from long-forgotten websites, giving you endless ‘last chances’ to remain opted-in to their post-GDPR mailing lists, and by the time you’re reading this issue of Housing Technology, the GDPR deadline will be just a few hours away.
Assuming you’ve taken care of the necessary pre-GDPR communications activities and set up a GDPR-compliant data infrastructure, we believe that it’s vitally important to ensure that your ongoing GDPR strategy protects you from the effects of ‘data outliers’; that is, tenant or other personal data being added to your housing management or CRM system (for example) without going through some sort of ‘GDPR data gateway’ to ensure the data’s GDPR status is suitably tagged.
This same process also applies to the ‘shadow’ work-arounds mentioned above; staff creating and maintaining their own spreadsheets of contact data are unlikely to apply the same rigorous GDPR controls as the designated data controllers responsible for your main CRM system, for example.
We suspect that although the likely number of these ‘data outliers’ will be only a very small proportion of your overall dataset, they will be the ones where you’re more likely to fall foul of GDPR compliance, so keep your data front and centre, and out of the shadows.
