General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in May 2018 and by now, your organisation should have taken some necessary steps to secure your digital network and strengthen your database against vulnerability. Have you factored in making the necessary changes to your Visitor Management solution to ensure GDPR compliance?  

With the introduction of GDPR, organisations have focused so much energy and resources on ensuring their business architecture and network are secure they have forgotten to ensure the compliance of their front-of-house Visitor Management solution. 

Visitor books, both traditional and digital, hold personal information on visitors who enter sites making GDPR compliance essential for any Visitor Management process. Key elements of this legislation affecting visitor data includes:

• How is the information captured & shared within your organisation?
• Is explicit opt-in used where communications are to be sent to visitors?
• How long is it necessary to store this information?
• What process is in place for removal of personal data?

Traditional Visitor Book GDPR Compliance

Ensuring Visitor Privacy: When a visitor signs-in, they is no obstruction preventing them from scanning the visitor book, how can an organisation ensure the privacy of past visitor details? 

Purging Data on Request: For organisations who rely on traditional Visitor Management, data duplication is a frequent occurrence in the case of return visitors.  Initially this was not an issue, however with the passing of GDPR, organisations are now required to track all visit records and must be capable of effectively deleting specific visitor data on request. An increase in administrative burden and risk of error increases with this form of data management. 

Relevant Data Capture: With most large organisations, they encounter a variety of different guests on a daily basis. i.e. visitors, interviewees, contractors, delivery personnel. In Article 5 (1) (C) of GDPR, it's stated 'Personal data must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purpose for which they are processed'. For traditional Visitor Management, this means reception staff must ensure relevant sign-in sheets are provided to each visitor type to ensure any unnecessary visitor information isn't gathered. 

Digital Visitor Management GDPR Compliance

Preventing visitors from accessing past visitor data records and offering multiple third-party integrations, digital visitor management solutions are the ideal process replacement to achieve a GDPR compliant visitor strategy.

However, not all providers will offer the same level of compliance. While some solutions may simply remove any data related to previous visitors once the necessary storage period has been reached, TDS Visitor enables organisations to anonymise visitor data, ensuring authorised personnel maintain access to key visitor trends and space utilisations reports without compromising on GDPR compliance.

Automated anonymisation and data removal can also be enabled to relieve the administrative burden associated with managing visitor data under this new legislation. 

Offering customised workflows, TDS Visitor can be tailored to present visitors whose data you wish to use for marketing/ongoing communications with an explicit opt-in screen. 

Read More

• Achieving GDPR-Compliance with a Visitor Management Solution
• 11 Essential Visitor Management Features
• 5 Reasons to Digitise your Visitor Experience
• How to manage VIP's with a Visitor Management Solution 
• How GDPR Impacts Organisations in the USA

To learn more, visit TDS.