TrustArc launches GDPR tool to help comply with data subject rights

Ready or not, enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming up in May and with it a slew of newly refined consumer rights. A full eight articles of the lengthy regulation are dedicated to six new or enhanced rights, including the right to be completely forgotten.

Hoping to ease GDPR confusion around these rights, TrustArc, the compliance company formerly knowns as TRUSTe, has added an Individual Rights Manager module to its data privacy platform.

The IRM tool consists of a customizable form for user requests and templates that analyze the request and provide next steps. Companies that want further guidance can add consulting services.

Customers access the form through a link or button on the business’s website.

Screen shot of the Individual Rights Manager tool’s consumer-facing inquiry form

“We’ve created very specialized templates,” Dave Deasy, TrustArc’s senior vice president of marketing, said of the system that sifts through the user-submitted forms. “We’ve created one that ties to each of the different individual rights. It provides the company a quick way to be able to determine how to respond. We call them mini-assessments. They essentially take some very complex language in the GDPR and then break [it] down into very simple steps that the company can then go through.”

Deasy said it’s hard for companies to plan for inquiries because “nobody has any idea how many [requests from data subjects] they’ll get. If — just based on the type of industry and the type of clientele they have and maybe the size of the company — you’re going to get 10 or 20 of these a year, you’re not really that concerned or interested in trying to integrate with some other system. It’s just not worth the effort versus a large consumer-facing company that maybe has social media-type products where you could be dealing with thousands of inquiries. Then you’ve got a much, much higher desire to try to figure out how to potentially integrate with something else.”