You might have heard about the new General Data Protection Regulations the EU is planning to enforce from 2018 when they were announced a few months ago. Most of the confusion and panic about this, however, has only come about recently. It wouldn’t be surprising if you’d only heard about it after the Brexit campaign to leave the EU succeeded a couple of weeks ago.

Brexit doesn’t affect your adherence to the EU GDPR

A lot of people think that because “Brexit” won, we can instantaneously drop any EU laws we want – considering we’ve effectively severed our ties. But it’s not that simple, and we have a long road left.

Whilst we have made the decision to leave the European Union, this act does not come into proper effect until article fifty is triggered and we have a long talk with the rest of the EU to sort out the conditions of our leaving. EU negotiations tend to take a long time – the discussion to decide the final version of the GDPR itself, for example, took around four years.

Imagine how long it will take to decide how an entire country will remove itself from connections with all 28 of the other EU member states, whilst also maintaining certain trade agreements. It’ll be complicated, and it’s been estimated that it’ll take at least two years, if not more. That’s not all either. For article fifty to even set off all these talks, we need a stable leader to get things started.

But why is all this important? We’ve already established that we can’t technically cut ourselves off from the European Union for a few years to come. Therefore, we still need to adhere to EU rules and regulations – that’s just the way things are. In fact, even after leaving we would still need to have at least an equivalent set of data protection regulations in place to make it possible to continue trading with those 28 European member states.

There’s no way around it. You can’t escape the data protection laws that are coming, and you need to be preparedBetter yet, why not take a look at our GDPR compliance checklist to ensure you’re 100% compliant with the upcoming legislation change?