THE GDPR (GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION)
The ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ (GDPR) is a piece of European data protection legislation designed to replace and strengthen the ‘1995 EU Data Protection Directive’ and unify these standards across the European Union.
The regulation aims to give consumers greater control over their personal data. The GDPR is set to become law on 25th May 2018 and applies to any company that stores or processes the personal data of an EU citizen.
How this affects you?
We store your personal data on our servers when you use our service. Doing so allows us to operate our website, issue you documentation for your journey and ensure your travel runs smoothly. This classes us, The Taxi Firm Ltd, as a ‘data controller’ and a ‘data processor’, as a customer or passenger of Taxi Firm Ltd, are a ‘data subject’. However, you may also be acting as a ‘data controller’, especially if you are booking on behalf of someone else. As a data controller, you may need to take steps to comply with GDPR requirements.
Your/Our Responsibilities
As a data controller, you should ensure you comply with the GDPR. We recommend you contact a legal professional to find out how the GDPR legislation will affect your organisation. The ICO recommends taking these 12 steps.
Awareness: You should ensure that decision-makers and key people in your organisation know that the law is changing to the GDPR. They need to appreciate the impact this is likely to have.
Information you hold: You should document your personal data, where it came from, and who you share it with. You may need to organise an information audit.
Communicating privacy information: You should review your current privacy notices and put a plan in place for making any necessary changes in time for GDPR implementation.
Individuals’ rights: You should check your procedures to ensure they cover all the rights individuals have, including how you would delete personal data or provide data electronically and in a commonly used format.
Subject access requests: You should update your procedures and plan how you will handle requests within the new timescales and provide any additional information.
Lawful basis for processing personal data: You should identify the legal basis for your processing activity in the GDPR, document it and update your privacy notice to explain it.
Consent: You should review how you seek, record and manage consent and whether you need to make any changes. Refresh existing consents now if they don’t meet the GDPR standard.
Children: You should start considering whether you need to put systems in place to verify individuals’ ages and obtain parental or guardian consent for any data processing activity.
Data breaches: You should ensure you have the right procedures to detect, report and investigate a personal data breach.
Data Protection by Design and Data Protection Impact Assessments: You should familiarise yourself now with the ICO’s code of practice on Privacy Impact Assessments and the latest guidance from the Article 29 Working Party, and work out how and when to implement them in your organisation.
Data Protection Officers: You should designate someone responsible for data protection compliance and assess where this role will sit within your organisation’s structure and governance arrangements. It would be best if you considered whether you are required to designate a Data Protection Officer formally.
International: If your organisation operates in more than one EU member state (i.e. you carry out cross-border processing), you should determine your lead data protection supervisory authority. Article 29 Working Party guidelines will help you do this.
What We’re Doing to be GDPR Compliant
The Taxi Firm Ltd takes data security seriously. We take many steps to protect your data. These include:
Enforcing ‘HTTPS’ connections to our web servers.
Running regular security scans on our network.
Regularly scheduled scans of all PCs with virus protection software.
Keeping an inventory of all the personal data we store and ensuring we only collect data required to carry out the service.
Maintaining a ‘Data Flow Map’ which lists where we store our data, including any third parties that are involved.
Regularly review our Data Protection Policies and ensure employees receive appropriate training.
Training staff on the ‘Data Breach Protocol’ to ensure everyone knows what to do in the unlikely event of a data breach.
We have a handful of documents available for customers, which should enhance your understanding of how we use your data.
The GDPR has expanded consumers’ right to access their data and the removal/deletion of records. However, some legal limitations placed on us could limit our ability to comply with your request. These include our licensing authority’s Peterborough City Council requirement that we store six months of complete journey records or our obligation as a limited company to keep accounting (transaction) records for six years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to.
The Taxi Firm Ltd is committed to being fully compliant with this regulation.
If you have any questions, please use our Contact us page.
