The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - (EU) 2016/679 - is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. The GDPR kicks in on May 25th, 2018 and gives Europeans more rights over their personal data, as well as simplifying the regulatory environment for companies doing business within the EU.

The most important new rights for users under the GDPR are

• • Right of access - Users have a right to receive a copy of personal data collected about them
  • Right to be forgotten / erasure - Users can request erasure of personal data related to them
  • Right to know what 3rd parties can see the data a company keeps about them.

First of all, the GDPR applies to all organizations collecting data about users in the EU, regardless of where they’re based. Failure to comply with the GDPR can result in fines of up to 20 million EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.

GDPR comes with new obligations for companies as well; here are a few of them:

• • Data minimization (collection and retention) - companies can only collect and keep data that is necessary for providing the products or services
  • Data breach procedures - companies now have up to 72 hours to report any data breaches to the supervisory authorities.
  • Transparent Privacy / Cookie Policy - New obligations to disclose precisely what data is being stored and who to contact about exercising user rights under the GDPR.
  • 3rd party data processors must also be compliant - e.g. eCommerce platforms, analytics, phone support, etc.

There's also a new role in every company: Data Protection Officer -  a person with expert knowledge of data protection law and practices that should assist companies in complying with GDPR rules.

Connectify Inc. officially became GDPR ready on May 25th. Here’s what we did to comply with the new EU regulation:

• We appointed a new Data Protection Officer.
• We updated the privacy policies for all our services: Connectify Hotspot, Speedify and Pingify.
• We notified existing customers in our applications about our privacy policy changes.
• We've tightened our internal data security to protect against breaches of personal data.
• We've adopted procedures to guarantee all user rights of the GDPR.

Note: Because Pingify does not collect any data from its users, no updates to the app were required.

Did you get the latest versions of our products? They have the GDPR ready policies embedded, so be sure to upgrade now in order to get the best performance:

• Connectify Hotspot download
• Speedify download
• Pingify download