GDPR Compliance Checklist

January 9, 2025
GDPR Compliance Checklist

Our mission is to make data protection easy for people: easy to understand and easy to read about. We do that through our blog posts, making it easy for the end-user to understand personal data protection.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), EU’s legal framework for personal data protection, mandates organisations to follow its stringent guidelines regarding processing person data. It standerdises data protection laws across EU member states to empower individuals with greater control over their personal data. GDPR reshapes the way organisations approach data collection, processing, storing and sharing. That said, any business dealing with the personal data of the EU citizens are obliged to comply with GDPR standards. However, GDPR requirements are stringent and comprehensive that make it challenging for organisations to meet all. Using a GDPR compliance checklist can help ensure they don’t overlook any critical requirement. 

This article provides a comprehensive GDPR compliance checklist to help your organization align with this crucial regulation.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive set of rules and regulations on information privacy effective on organistions dealing with personal data of the citizens within the European Union and the European Economic Area. Organisations are mandated to maintain transparency during collecting, processing and sharing data of the citizens by allowing them to exert more control over personal data.‍

The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union enacted the regulation on April 27, 2016. It was put into action May 25, 2018.

After the UK’s departure from the European Union, known as “Brexit”, the country’s privacy rules are now guided by the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). These rules are similar to the EU’s GDPR in terms of data collection, processing, storing and sharing.

GDPR is widely adopted by other nations as a foundation of privacy laws due to its stringent standards.

GDPR is based on seven key principles:

  1. Lawfulness, Fairness and Transparency: GDPR mandates organisations to fairly, transparently and lawfully process the personal data of data subjects.
  2. Purpose Limitation: Collecting, processing and sharing of personal data with third-parties should be limited to the specified, explicit and legal purpose. Any processing of the collected personal data incompatible with the already-mentioned purpose is an act of penalisation. 
  3. Data Minimization: Personal data collected should be adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary for the intended purpose of processing.
  4. Accuracy: Organisations must ensure they process only accurate, updated and consistent data. Any inaccurate and inconsistent data should be erased or rectified immediately upon detection. 
  5. Storage Limitation: GDPR permits the storage of personal data of data subjects as long as it is required to meet the processing purpose. 
  6. Integrity and Confidentiality: Data controllers must implement proactive organisational and technical measures to keep personal data secured against unauthorised access, data theft, or data loss. 
  7. Accountability: GDPR holds data controllers accountable for all data processing activities and their aftermaths. They should be compliant with the GDPR standards. 

Who Does Apply on

As we have already stated, any business, regardless of their location, dealing with the personal data of the citizens within the EU and EEA are mandated to comply with GDPR standards. All 27 EU members along with Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway fall under EEA.

Any company, regardless of its location, size or the type of data it processes, fall under GDPR regulation if: 

  1. It is a non-EU eCommerce business that offers service or goods to the residents in the EU and EEA.
  2. It’s a non-EU business that regularly monitors the behaviour, preferences or attitudes of the residents of the EU and EEA, for example using tracking cookies.  
  3. It’s a third-party data processor processing personal data on behalf of the controller company within the EU 
  4. It’s a public authority (Public authorities: Except for courts acting in their judicial capacity.

GDPR applies to both public authorities and non-profit organisations if they process personal data of individuals residing in the European Union. Cloud-hosted businesses processing personal data of data subjects within the EU and EEA are also under the scope of GDPR. 

Please note, data processing activities related to personal or household purposes, law enforcement, national security and specific research purposes are exempted from GDPR regulation. 

Why Should You Comply With the GDPR?

GDPR compliance is a prerequisite for organisations associated with the residents of the aforementioned locations to operate optimally. It forms a consistent and standardised data protection regulation across all EU member states, streamlining the regulatory environment and enabling organisations to run more efficiently. That said, failing to comply with GDPR standards can cause businesses to face serious repercussions – hefty fines, penalties, legal consequences, reputational damage or even imprisonment. Two tiers of fines are levied on businesses as penalties based on their degree of non-compliance with GDPR regulations. The first tier of penalty is up to €10 million, or 2% of their yearly global turnover – whichever is higher. The second tier is up to €20 million, or 4% of their annual global turnover – whichever is higher. These two tiers of fines are designed to ensure the imposed penalties align with severity of the infringement. 

In addition, GDPR compliance is a testament to a company’s robust data privacy policy. Data controllers that fail to demonstrate their compliance with GDPR regulations lose the trust of their consumers to, therefore, are doomed to failure. This is true for both EU and non-EU customers since GDPR has extra-terrestrial impact. After all, you won’t find a single customer who would want to deal with a business with no certification of having proactive security and privacy policy in place. GDPR compliance assures customers that their data is handled and stored and retained responsibly. 

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To comply with GDPR standards, organisations need to take some proactive measures. For example, more than 46% of companies have reported to re-engineer their internal security systems, team and measures and hiring new staff to comply with GDPR requirements, according to a Netsparker survey. 

Possessing a GDPR checklist and ensuring all items are ticked can make this complex transition more manageable. It serves as a guide throughout your journey towards GDPR compliance.

What is a GDPR Compliance Checklist?

How to know if a company is GDPR compliant? 

A company is GDPR compliance if it can demonstrate the followings:

  • Adherence to the GDPR data processing principles mentioned
  • The implementation of proactive and required data security measures
  • Upholding the rights of data subjects
  • Adherence to rules for data transfers and data sharing

You need to take a strategic and systematic approach to GDPR compliance. Here’s the checklist we have compiled to help your business evade penalties and comply with GDPR regulations.

The GDPR compliance checklist

  • Conduct a Comprehensive Data Audit: GDPR data audit is critical to compliance with the Regulation. It is a systematic approach to review the data collection, storing, processing and data protection strategies a company adopts to pinpoint potential areas that can lead to non-compliance. While conducting an audit, make sure you categorise your business data, map your data storage systems and maintain a register of all data access levels. Data that you have shared with third-party processors and your data retention policies should also be taken into account while auditing. 
  • Review Access Policies: One of the key provisions of GDPR is to limit access to personal data of individuals to only the required authorized business users. As a data controller, implementing robust and high-end data access and management systems is pivotal to lock out unauthorised access to personal data while also registering all access requests.
  • Update Data Security Policies: As per Article 32 of GDPR that covers data security policies, organisations must implement stringent protection measures, such as encryptions, firewalls, threat detection systems to augment the security posture of their systems.  
  • Prepare a GDPR-Compliant Privacy Notice: To comply with Article 12 of GDPR, businesses should maintain a thorough communication with the data subjects. They should be provided with a concise and easily accessible privacy notice that clearly details the legal basis for data collection, their data privacy rights and for how long the company can hold their data.  
  • Align Policies with User Rights: Empowering individuals with greater control is one of the key goals of enforcing stringent regulatory obligations on data controllers. GDPR, delineating user rights in Article 15-22, mandates organisations to clearly define the rights they should offer their customers – the right to access, delete, or modify their personal data. Controllers must stop any further processing of personal data upon withdrawal of their consent with no prior notice. 
  • Review Consent Mechanisms: As per Article 6, GDPR, one of the prerequisites of compliance with the Regulation for controllers is to take explicit consent from individuals before processing their data. To comply with GDPR standards, make sure your consent forms are concise, transparent about the probable processing activities and include options facilitating the management of consent preferences for the data subjects. You should allow data owners to withdraw consent anytime. 
  • Audit Third-Party Contracts: Article 28 of GDPR holds data controllers accountable for ensuring the third-party data processors they use comply with GDPR standards. To evade penalties, make sure your contract with processors mention their GDPR compliance. Handing over sensitive personal data of your users to a processor without verifying their data security and privacy policies is a big fat no. 
  • Assess International Data Transfer Policies: GDPR delineated the rules of data transfer outside the EU in the Article 44-50. If your business involves international data transfer, conduct risk assessment and ensure that such transfers comply with GDPR. standards. Manage Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs): To efficiently comply with GDPR regulations, make sure you respond to Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) without any undue delay and within the timeframe – one month from receiving the access request. Article 15-22 details the data subject’s rights to access, modify or erase their personal information, mandating controllers to have appropriate measures in place to process these requests in the shortest possible time.
  1. Develop a Data Breach Response Plan: Having a data breach response plan detailing the process of detection, reporting and investigation makes it effortless for businesses to comply with GDPR standards. GDPR requires organisations to notify of a data breach within 72 hours of detecting it (Article 33). 

Following the above mentioned steps can help businesses dealing with personal information of the EU citizens comply with GDPR standards effortlessly.

Thomas Lambert
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