This is a document that sets out your approach to how you manage, store and delete records. If you’re required to keep information for a certain length of time, such as financial, medical or legal records, record your reasons in a retention policy. Have a reason to keep information, rather than a reason to get rid of it. While you can’t always legally contact people for marketing purposes, you can contact them to tell them things they need to know as part of the service you’re providing, or that would help keep them safe.

Generally speaking, you should consider them separately. Marketing messages, on the other hand, aim to promote a service, business or organisation. Service messages aim to keep people informed by providing important factual information, such as a warning about the safety of a product. Service messages aren’t the same as marketing messages. Putting service messages in the same boat as marketing We’ve set out the steps you need to follow in this handy guide on how to respond to a personal data breach. The 72 hours following a personal data breach are particularly critical. In the future, consider turning off the Autofill tool when sending work emails. If you can’t recall it, contact the person who received it and ask them to delete it. Try to recall the email as soon as possible. But the few seconds you save by using Autofill could end up costing you a lot more if you send personal data to the wrong person by mistake.Īct quickly. It’s a quick way to go through your address book. Tools like Autofill predict who you’re emailing when you start typing someone’s name in the ‘To’ field. This is easy to do, especially if more than one person in your address book has the same name. If you need more advice, you can get help and support from our dedicated team. That’s why we’ve put together some of the most common data protection mistakes that organisations tell us about on a daily basis – and how to fix them. Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been at this a while, the more you learn about data protection and what you should be doing to comply with the law, the more likely you are to notice when things don’t go to plan.

This blog has been written to help sole traders, small organisations, and SMEs understand some of the most common data protection mistakes that can happen – and simple steps that can help put things right.

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