Ensuring Digital Signature Lawfulness for Small Businesses in European Union

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for small businesses in European Union

and it is a complex set of  rules that organizations  that dictates that certain requirements and  and organizations must dedicate as a result   quite a big amount of time and money to comply with it. And for users, that's maybe   also difficult to understand. It's a very German idea, by the way. German leadership pushed for the   strengthening of data protection in Europe and  part of that has to do with its history. A few general points about what the GDPR entails is that, ing to the law, businesses   must be able to show that they've made efforts to comply with the law. That really shows proof   and one key principle is that they need to  know what data they hold on their customers. So if you're a business or even the data you  hold on people, if you're a public organization   why you hold this data, for what purpose, because some companies keep data for a limited amount   of time or longer, they collect it for analytics to keep it as part of a mailing list or email   marketing. Another thing is that organizations  need to show proof of consent from people that   they've allowed, the people have allowed them to use their data which is why you as a   user have to tick those boxes that that ask  you if you've read the terms and conditions.   Another principle is that users should be  able to opt out for their data to be collected.  The GDPR did raise the bar globally for data protection. It's not a fundamental   change at first glance compared to its  predecessor the data protection directive   and laws are still drafted by humans. But now  you have machine learning, AI systems, automated   decision making that are becoming a reality. So we'll come to that probably   later and because that also impacts technology.  Major changes that the GDPR introduced are   fines, so non-compliance has serious consequences,  and infringements could cost up to 20 million euros or four percent of the firm's  global annual revenue, from the financial   year preceding, whichever is higher. So privacy  and data protection are now taken much more   seriously by companies as you can imagine and just to briefly mention a couple of cases that our   audience might have heard of British Airways and Marriott's hotels chains were each fined  about 20 million euros or pounds something like  that for insufficient measures like technical and   organizational measures to ensure information security. You also have Google's fine, which   was about 50 million euros because it's failed to provide enough information to users about   its content, data content policies etc. GDPR  created what you can call artificial scarcity   of data and driven up its costs by limiting  the access that companies have to that data.  Next to the regulatory costs of compliance you  know having to hire lawyers, privacy lawyers   instead of maybe hiring engineers and maybe instead of investing in R&D, companies are buying   GDPR insurance, because they're afraid of sanctions and fines, so they want to really stay in the clear. So I think this reallocation of investments  from technologies, to making sure you're not   infringing more new laws, that could put EU businesses at a competitive advantage compared to   you know the United States and Asian competitors