No matter the size or type of your organisation, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA / Act) requires that you appoint an information officer.
The information officer is a vital role in your organisation since the person is tasked with heading up the organisation’s POPIA compliance project, ensuring that any business procedures and operations involving the handling of personal information, complies with POPIA’s conditions for lawful processing.
We are here to help you with understanding what POPIA is all about and firmly believe that getting to grips with the basics, understanding why you need to comply and how POPIA may affect your business before diving head first into making changes, which may ultimately not be necessarily or suit your business operations, is vital.
Therefore we recommend that all organisations consider commencing their POPIA compliance journeys with our Introduction Knowledge Session.
Data subjects are afforded a variety of rights in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) because at the end of the day, it is their own personal information that is being requested and used and they therefore, are afforded a level of control in respect of what is done to their own personal information and how it is handled.
An operator is person who is contracted by the responsible party in terms of a mandate to assist the responsible party with the processing of personal information. In practice this may be a service level provider that is contracted by a company to assist in the handling of personal data in order for the company to provide its goods and services to its customers.
Data breaches continue to signal the end of a number of businesses. Having a clear plan, incident report mechanism, and a team in place and testing the plan from time to time can mean the difference between your business surviving a breach or simply mitigating the extent of the damages from a financial and reputational point of view. It is therefore important to understand what exactly constitutes a breach and what POPIA expect to happen if such an event occurs within your business.
Direct marketing is where a supplier either in person, by post, or electronically, communicates with a consumer for the purpose of advertising his, her or its goods for sale, services available or to request a donation. Direct marketing is client-facing, which means that mishaps and mistakes are automatically visible, while daily communication with data subjects locally and/or globally, makes it highly prone to violations of the required data protection standards.