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The right to be informed

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  • Individuals have the right to be informed about the collection and use of their personal data. This is a key transparency requirement under the GDPR.
  • You must provide individuals with information including: your purposes for processing their personal data, your retention periods for that personal data, and who it will be shared with. We call this ‘privacy information’.                                  
  • You must provide privacy information to individuals at the time you collect their personal data from them.
  • If you obtain personal data from other sources, you must provide individuals with privacy information within a reasonable period of obtaining the data and no later than one month.
  • There are a few circumstances when you do not need to provide people with privacy information, such as if an individual already has the information or if it would involve a disproportionate effort to provide it to them.
  • The information you provide to people must be concise, transparent, intelligible, easily accessible, and it must use clear and plain language.
  • It is often most effective to provide privacy information to people using a combination of different techniques including layering, dashboards, and just-in-time notices.
  • User testing is a good way to get feedback on how effective the delivery of your privacy information is.
  • You must regularly review, and where necessary, update your privacy information. You must bring any new uses of an individual’s personal data to their attention before you start the processing.
  • Getting the right to be informed correct can help you to comply with other aspects of the GDPR and build trust with people, but getting it wrong can leave you open to fines and lead to reputational damage.