Tribe’s Features to Ensure GDPR Compliance for Your Community

⚠️ Note: This post is relevant to communities powered by the older version of Tribe. If you built a Tribe community before the end of May 2021, you are on the older version.

Anyone who is remotely associated with web technologies or uses any web app has at least heard the word GDPR. Back in 2018, we were all swamped with emails because of the GDPR enforcement that focused on data privacy. These emails were crafted to gain or retain permission for ongoing communication and to notify recipients about the updated privacy policy.

Coming to Tribe, in a nutshell, Tribe is fully GDPR compliant and the communities built with Tribe have all the right tools to ensure they remain compliant as well. We have previously discussed Tribe’s commitment to GDPR and a comprehensive set of initiatives taken by Tribe to ensure data privacy as well as security. Just to reiterate, at Tribe, we completely believe that the right to privacy and control over data should be an individual’s fundamental right.

In this post, we’re going to highlight the exact features and settings that you can leverage to ensure your community’s GDPR compliance.

Cookie Consent

Since the day GDPR emerged, there has been a gradual growth in the number of apps and websites implementing the cookie consent mechanisms. Now it has become quite common for website visitors to see notifications pop up or slide atop websites that nudge visitors about the use of cookies.

We understand that your community should also be able to comply with this GDPR requirement. Hence, we have an app called “Cookie Consent” on Tribe app store where you would be able to:

• Put a message of your choice about tracking user data.
• Customize the text of the action buttons.
• Defining the position of cookie consent notice.
• An option to give users the choice of rejecting the agreement.
• An option to community admin to define what happens if the user rejects the agreement.
• Upon user clicks on rejection, Admins can redirect the users to the URL of their choice or disable cookies with a prompt message.

In the following months, we will add more features to the app that enables admin to target different geographical areas and giving the visitors an option to specify which apps are able to track their activity.

We are releasing this free app for everyone. There are more premium sophisticated apps out there if you wish to use them.

EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs)

We have updated our Data Processing Agreement regarding EU to US/Canada data transfers. This was done in light of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling on July 16, 2020. The CJEU ruling invalidated Privacy Shield but confirmed that the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) remain a lawful transfer mechanism for personal data transferred outside of the EU, EEA, Switzerland, or the UK (as applicable).

Hence, we have added EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to DPA to facilitate the above change and enable our European customers to continue using Tribe in compliance with GDPR.

???? We have also appointed a representative in the European Union for data protection matters pursuant to Article 27 of the GDPR.

Link to the privacy policy

According to GDPR, it is critical to give a dedicated link to the privacy policy. Hence, Tribe now allows you to add a link to the privacy policy from the “Links” section available in the “Admin Panel”.

Delete user

Users should be able to request the website or app owner to delete their data. When you get such a request from your community member your community admins can simply open up the profile and click on “Delete Account Permanently” to remove the user and all the content posted by the user.

Export specific user data

According to GDPR, the users must have the right to request their data stored by the website. In this case, the ability to extract specific user data becomes crucial. With Tribe, it is quite easy to export the member data.

All you need to do is access the “Reports” section from the “Admin settings” and click on “Users” tab on the top navigation. Then you can search for the specific user and click on the data export icon to download the data.

Over to you

This was an overview of different features and settings you can use to ensure that your community is GDPR compliant. Now. it’s time for you to use these features and inform your members that they have complete control over their data based on GDPR.

Do you have any feedback for us to improve compliance? Head over to our community and post your thoughts.