Everything You Need to Know About WordPress and GDPR Compliance #423

and welcome to the seo podcast owner secrets of internet marketing my name is chris burris owner of eweb results my name is matt bertram your seo researcher welcome back to another fun filled edition of our podcast this is podcast number 423 no no that's that's wrong oh i got this i got there's a glitch in the matrix can maybe we can back to the future we're we're back to the future what is it just 423 boom okay good good we've got that corrected welcome back to another fun filled edition of this podcast as always we have a tip from the previous podcast and the tip this week is create a definitive guide for your industry to attract more links so we had a three-part series which was actually interrupted by podcast number 420 and that three-part series was about six linkable assets and how to actually get links back to them and so uh making a definitive guide is an important part of that i think that was a powerful one out of the last podcast so uh make sure you subscribe and you follow boom skyscraper remember we are broadcasting live here from houston texas and matt and i we are your results rebels i want to jump into a review results researchers results researching rebels okay does that work results researching rebels with the that's fine uh that's ruckus full i'll take it let's go so we do have a review this review is from facebook it is of course five stars i just guess that was a really high one i just guess you just guess i just guess i was like this you know i got back to the future yep back to the future you are uh psychic or psychotic one or the other connor wickham he says brilliant podcast great seo knowledge for anyone in the industry there was an exclamation that's why i did that punch in the face to you connor uh for that great review thank you hey you're probably tuning back in because most people

are tuning back in and if you are you might be interested in some of our tips you can get five online marketing mistakes that tank your business and how to avoid them by going to ewebresults.com slash seotips yep that takes you there bill uh let's see we have a teaser we're covering an article today so we taught we we mentioned this i think two podcasts ago that we were going to get back to this gdpr right that's the the great britain and the general data protection regulation in the european union yeah all the europe yep in all of the european union and uh and we're going to talk about an article the ultimate guide to wordpress don't worry if you don't have wordpress this podcast is still going to apply to you uh and so wordpress and gdpr compliance everything you need to know we're going to get right back to that in a second uh if you're in a position to uh we'd like you to tweet actually we'd like you to tweet now and actually i didn't get his uh this is by uh this page is maintained by saeed uh balki right so you can connect with him if you're in a position to to tweet what we would like you to do is tweet um hashtag seo podcast tag us in it at best seo podcast at eweb results at matt bertram live at chris burris eweb yes did i get him yeah that was all good memories not failing me uh and just let them know that we're you're tuning into an article about gdpr we would really appreciate if you did that hey if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast howdy and welcome to the podcast we are from texas so we actually do say howdy uh if you've listened to this podcast before then you know what we're about to skip we run a contest each and every week and the way we run that contest is if we get 10 shikos a share

a like and a follow so if we get 10 shikos and a review i just read the review then we move this piece the piece where we tell you how to connect with us we tell you how to give us a a shiko a share a like or follow to the end of the podcast and so we're moving that to the end we appreciate your engagement yep yeah absolutely uh let's see if you would like a free comprehensive website analysis you can get one by going to ewebresults.com and then you will click the free website analysis button and you will get your and we have a facebook chat bot where you can chat with us during uh eight to five coming soon eight to five chatbot coming soon we're getting some love symbols on the on facebook there we do want to make sure that we pass some and give some love to all of our youtubers out there uh thank you for tuning in on youtube i've got just a little piece of news i thought this was interesting i just pulled it up the fcc bans unauthorized phone charges okay i feel like this should have been done a long time ago that's you know where they'll put different services on your phone and charge you whatever apparently it's officially banned that's good i government doing their job look at that that is really good all right so that is the potatoes of the podcast it is time to get into the meat i'll need that later so i'm glad it didn't fly away very far we are covering this article the ultimate guide to wordpress and gdpr compliance everything you need to know if you fast forwarded through the potatoes don't worry if you don't have wordpress website this is still relevant relevant to you so it really started off with a question are you confused by gdpr um and how it might affect your website remember it stands for general data protection regulation and it's a european union law right it's

like the fine chris what's the fine the fine do you want do you want it in pounds or do you or or do you want it in uh in u.s dollars you convert it to dollars it'd be more 26.8 million dollar fine or four percent of your global profits whichever is higher do this yeah listen you need to do this i read this whole thing and we're gonna we're gonna go through this and talk to you you know if you're in the states or if you're outside of the european union how does this affect you we will talk about this uh it took effect may 25th right so it's already in effect um we like we said four percent of companies global revenue um and it's creating widespread panic i would we we got our plugins in time we got our plugins we got the we got the things in place um so the first question is just dd ddpr apply to my wordpress or my website in general the answer is yes if your website has visitors from the european union this law applies to you um all right so this is one of the important pieces of that fine right so yeah 26.8 million dollars is a pretty impressive fine just know that's not where the process starts right so it starts with a warning and then there's a reprimand then there's a suspension of data processing and if you continue to violate the law that's when the large fines will hit so okay so you kind of in a sense you don't need to worry most of us are going to be under the radar one of the points is that this is probably for um for those large companies that are collecting lots of data they just want to scare them enough because they will in fact and you know uh uh put fines on them in the 20 million dollar range did you see that google fine that it was like 11 billion or something out of the eu yeah

oh i didn't see that one or it might have been great britain or something it was like it was in the billions in the billions here's your billion dollar i don't remember exactly what it's it wouldn't surprise me four percent of gross for for the year i was like that's gonna hit the stock price just a little bit it's gonna it's gonna you're gonna see a dip um and and he makes the point right this is it's not the eu is being some sort of evil government collaboration maybe the maximum fine uh in their opinion is really again to target those those big guys facebook and google um once you understand that that's the spirit of law it's really not too crazy it's just about uh any and we'll summarize it here towards the end uh but basically the data it covers right so what's required in the gdpr name email physical address ip address health information income information that's all personal data and you want to make sure that's the that's the thing that you've got to do the following with regard to i've used basically all that to target people yes yes and and i'm assuming we will continue to do that because it's very effective uh and and in fact uh this isn't saying you can't do that anymore it's just saying you have to put certain things in place to tell them to tell them make sure that they're advised right in fact step one here explicit consent yeah so so what i used to do is in the privacy policies basically like we can do anything with your data we can we want resell it we can do anything we can sell it we can throw it away we can give it to people we can do whatever we want and we changed it don't worry that was my old days that was also you're trying to scare everyone quick abort ask to delete data so that's one thing you can't actually do uh you must obtain explicit consent so

and you can't be and they're saying you need to use common language you can't be unambiguous so now you really should have a button on your form submissions right if you're going to collect form submissions from the uk uh or from great britain i mean from the european union uh and it needs to say hey here's what we're going to do with our data and that policy needs to be clear and succinct it can't be like and therefore thus thou we're going to wholly hold the data in some no no it's got to be like your data is going to be available to these kinds of people we might market it to these kinds of people that kind of thing okay so that's important um and it does say you can't have this is interesting a kind of a bone of contention you can't just send unsolicited emails to people who gave you their business card or filled out that's our that's half of our marketing strategy no or filled out your website contact form because they did not opt into your uh marketing news they filled out your online marketing form it's it's a little crazy right right and so here's the deal you just have to have a button that says hey because because the deal is is if somebody maybe they just want to ask a question yeah that doesn't mean that they want to actually get on your newsletter right and so the reality is at least in our case right because just to ask us a question it takes our time that costs us money so uh here's how it works if you want to ask us a question you will get on our newsletter list and we just need to be explicit about that like that's what this rule says it doesn't say you can't do that it just has to say when you press submit you need to agree to this and when you agree to this that's going to mean that uh we're going to you know

send you a newsletter i don't want to send them a newsletter i want to send them an email drip to have them call me yeah like i want to i don't like a rapid fryer eight emails per hour until they actually call me to say hey please turn this off no no no no that's ineffective you don't want to do that obviously um yeah so you just got to let them know what you're going to do with your data it doesn't mean that you have to even you don't even have to accept the forms right it's your business if you don't want to accept the form submission unless they agree to your terms great like but you have to be very explicit about what those terms means if that makes sense okay um they also have to have a right to the data which says hey i need you to send me an email with all the data that you have on me right you can go to google and see what google profiles you yeah it's pretty cool yeah it's scary too right like how much do you know about me um so they have the right to download and they also have the right to be forgotten so if they say hey you need to delete all my data you've got to have a process and be able to delete all the data so so this is like total kind of side note but you know those people that were like robo dialing like crazy which it looks like you're getting a little bit of that right now i'm getting robo dialing so so i got a robo dialer on the phone and i said stop calling me right like because it was so you you waited through the message and yeah and i was like please take me off his list and stop calling me and it was some lady and she was like screw you and she hung up on me i said take me off the list i was like

we're not going to take you off the list what yeah like they're like we don't care they're in like pakistan or like not pakistan just anywhere somewhere not here overseas i'm not labeling anybody but i'm just saying that nigeria okay no no i'm just kidding but but no seriously it's overseas they don't care they do not one of the reasons they don't care is because their phone number was spoofed yeah so the number it's not a real number so so my number got spoofed to somebody at some point yeah and they called you back and said stop calling yeah and then i was like how to do this whole thing and yeah but it's just crazy like where spoofed but anyways yeah so they have to be have the right to be deleted yeah and also if they unsubscribe it doesn't that doesn't mean delete them delete their data yeah this means stop sending them stuff yeah go figure like that's kind of been in place for a while um next point he talks about is breach notification so organizations must report certain types of breaches within 72 hours to the authorities unless the breach is like doesn't really matter and didn't risk data i got all these kind of crazy facts i thought i didn't have any news did you hear that like d uh what is ancestry.com got hacked or something like that i didn't hear that and so now they're they're worried about the data because they got your dna and they and they got your your uh you know the your financial background and then they got everything else and so now people are stealing a full package and they like everything of everything and your dna is your number one definer right so it was is the ultimate definer yeah yeah it's kind of crazy uh okay so you got to notify authorities in 72 hours if the breach is harmless okay don't worry uh if the breach is high risk you actually must inform individuals who are impacted right

away and and the intent of this is like the cover-ups the yahoo cover-ups and oh oh i just want to consent with an attorney as we are not lawyers consult with an attorney yeah or yes yeah yeah get the consent of your policy from an attorney give the consent from your lawyer based on what you say don't listen to us this for educational purposes make sure your lawyer clicks the little box yeah to consent on your policy yes next is data protection officers so uh it actually goes as far to say is if you're collecting large amounts of data then you need to have an officer uh you know in the company in the corporation that's responsible for protecting that data red tape yeah government add more red tape more costs add more red tape so here's the summary to put it in plain english ddpr make sure that businesses can't go around spamming people by sending emails they don't ask for businesses can't sell people data without their explicit consent okay good luck getting that consent it's actually how many people do you think read the old policy that used to have on your old business where you could do anything with the data one person yeah i'm just i'm just like statistically it's got to be at least one yeah there's one somewhere yeah uh businesses have to delete user accounts and unsubscribe them from email list if the user asks to do that and businesses have to report data breaches uh for uh uh and overall be better about data protection sounds reasonable yeah it sounds yeah ultimately it's pretty reasonable all right so then we're going to get into a little maybe a little bit more specific to to wordpress but i think uh keep listening even if your site's not on wordpress because we've kind of summarized this so um one question okay this is wordpress specific okay uh is wordpress 4.9.6 um is it gd gdpr compliant the answer to this is yes but i'm going to say um

say a couple things right it depends on the plugins you have it depends on what you have your site it can be i'm going to say that yeah yeah well what it does have built into it is there isn't really any data collection per se except for the comments right and so now when people submit comment comments the default wordpress setting is to have that confirmation that hey we're going to do this according to our private privacy policy uh so it does collect that data yeah and so so wordpress has made it so that people can download what they've commented at one point and that you can delete their data right seems reasonable so no big deal and that's the next one was comments consent yeah i kind of sped forward on that um so just make sure your wordpress is updated to 4.9.6 again they have added a data export and erase feature now it gets a little more tricky okay when you start talking about plugins right so keep those updated so yeah absolutely so one of the things and email is incredibly consistent now right so i i remember a day when you're like you know what uh i don't know two percent of emails don't seem to arrive right that just is pretty much gone now they're used now there's two percent maybe but they're in spam or they're somewhere else okay back then we uh made the decision internally that for all of our customers we would store form submissions so that if the email got lost if the email never got to the customer at least from time to time they could check the back end of wordpress and they can go oh look here's the form submissions and we can actually make contact with these people who probably want to give us money problem is that a good plan yeah problem problem i i i actually think we need to go back to all our clients right and make sure that they're all gdpr compliant yes like i

think that that's something that we need to do yeah thank you everyone for letting us know that i appreciate it without you yes i wouldn't get that thought wouldn't have been in my head yes and it's and it's again it's twofold one is make sure when the but forms are submitted that there is a button and it depends like so we've got a number of clients in the houston area their business is in houston whether they get european clients or not they don't care right so that's less of a concern um all right so you've got to handle the data properly you uh also wordpress has added a privacy policy generator so you can quickly make a privacy policy so that makes it easy um and then google analytics so here's one of them most website owners are using google analytics if you're not you should be uh and there's two things that you need to do one is either uh anonymize the data before storage and processing begins okay or add an overlay to the site that gives notice of cookies and ask users for consent prior to tracking we got that yep that's that's already added pop up uh and in our case it only shows up if you're in the eu so yeah that's kind of cool comes up when i've gone inside on mobile have you and uh anonymously maybe i clicked it and didn't realize it and it's not showing up i don't know i just assumed that it was like i know we took care of the problem yes and i didn't see the results so i just assumed hey we're overly safe here that's good we're overly good i'm glad somebody's on top of it yeah contact forms uh all right so again with the forms you need to get explicit consent that you're going to store their information uh explicit consent of what you're going to do with the data uh otherwise you kind of should disable all of that storage stuff simply adding a required consent

check box with clear explanation should be good enough for you to make your wordpress forms gdpr compliant yes and same thing really applies to the email marketing opt-in forms add the check check-in box or you can just require uh opt-in double opt-in right no right no so our recommendation is don't let them submit the form until they agree to your terms which says that you're going to give their data away for free um i mean whatever your policy you decide to be all right and then finally woocommerce of course lots of data is stored with woocommerce yes woocommerce has a comprehensive guide for site owners um so you can you know go check that out e-commerce is a whole whole another thing our woocommerce sites are compliant by the way we've made that extra especially because they get sales from the european union some of our companies are becoming our biggest clients yep pretty quickly that's pretty cool no they are yes they are yeah they are yeah uh all right retargeting ads if your website is running retargeting pixel or retarding code then you do need to have that cookie notice and that's a plugin yeah that's a plugin that takes care of that yeah get that and then the final thoughts the likelihood of getting a fine the day after the rule goes into effect by the way this article was written before may 25th um it's pretty close to zero right because they have to give you it was like 2012 it's about time we catch up uh and just remember the european union is not out to get you it's out to protect data one thing that i saw you know because i read a whole bunch of articles on this to try and get get some different perspectives and one thing that i saw and i think is actually probably uh salient is be prepared for this to come to the u.s yeah it may take a while but it's probably going to come here right because because when you

think about that summary people should control their data you shouldn't be able to span people like all of that stuff is reasonable so i'm going to take the other side of the argument okay okay so like things like monsanto and like gmos right can't do it in europe right but they're like yeah sell them to the americans okay okay right so like the americans is like the biggest market it's the open market and it's the open market that everybody just sells into right and so there's probably going to be a lot of uh lobbying right to to stop that like from the big companies maybe but i just see that the eu is it may take a while yeah and eu has actually always been pretty aggressive and and and protecting uh consumer data citizen data right so uh in citizens in general um i think it'll get it's not unreasonable the things that they're doing um you know it's just a little extra effort that we don't really you know would prefer not to go through uh-huh all right anything else i think that was pretty good now you are uh gdpr certified except we're not lawyers so don't take that we're just researchers that doesn't mean anything we're just lonely researchers uh yeah make sure you're taking care of the right steps if you're you know doing business or getting visitors uh traffic from the european union yeah all right so if you like this podcast we're going to ask you to do one simple thing share with five people because this is important stuff and we got to get it out there yep absolutely um if you're looking to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet the internet call eweb results for increased revenue in your business our phone number is 713-592-6724 um if you have a referral right so some people i still it's still hard to explain i don't know it's not we're going to put an affiliate program on the a link yeah a

link in the jobs or career section on our site right and so you can become a vendor right yeah that can work yeah that's just no and we'll explain it there we make websites yes yeah we do facebook ads and facebook manage your social media campaign like your social media in general yeah yeah i've seen that yes we do pay-per-click yes we do remarketing we are ranked number one for pay-per-click pay-per-click houston yeah yeah boom so yeah we do all those things if you send us a referral when they pay their bill we pay you right that works pretty simply um we were wait i do want to talk about this okay so here's the piece we do need reviews okay right yeah we do want you to connect with us yeah and you can connect with us here's some social sites let's say you could go to twitter.com slash eweb results instagram.com slash eweb results facebook.com slash eweb results and let's see what's another one um it's not even on here that's good it's not it that's good that's good linkedin.com slash company slash eweb results all of those will take you to our profiles on those platforms and if you're guessing you've probably got a good guess yeah yeah you got you got the good guess we're going to talk about pinterest youtube tumblr uh imger and flicker when is it imger imger yeah we got some active people here cool uh we'll talk about those next time also if you could leave us a review you were like where do you want them to leave us a review like yelp right now we want it we want it on yelp how do they get eweb results.com slash yelp that's pretty easy yeah and you can leave us a review hopefully you'll make that review five stars all right so we were filmed live here at 5999 west 34th street suite 106 houston texas 77092 uh you can find audio video and a transcript of this podcast at our website eweb results.com uh

you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on itunes in the european union across the planet internet and like interstellarly just like everywhere well we went to the future and saw i mean we're on actually more than just itunes and hrefs number one yeah so we're yeah all the future yeah so thank you thank you very much for making that happen uh please keep sending in your your questions your comments your reviews uh we really appreciate you and yeah if you want a free website analysis go to the website until the next podcast my name is chris burris matt bertram bye bye for now