Privacy Matters: Act or Your Authorities Will!
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is leading the way. But, just because you are running a Wi-Fi service outside the European Union does not mean you are home free. Privacy matters! The recent events with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica make that clear.
So, even if the government in your country has not yet come up with a GDPR-like privacy protection legislation, as a provider of Wi-Fi services you need to be proactive about this.
You must act to protect your users’ privacy, otherwise your government will do it for you. Eventually they will. Furthermore, it makes good business sense to care about privacy. Users will trust you more if you protect their privacy.
Consumers of free services are the real product
You do not have to stop collecting information about your users. On the contrary, users knows that if they consume a free service, they are most likely the product themselves. There’s just no such thing as a “free lunch.” What they want to know, though, is exactly how you plan to use their information.
And, by the way, as a business, ask the same types of questions to the cloud service provider offering you a “free” guest Wi-Fi service. Who owns the collected data? Who has access to the data? How will they use the data? How can you work to follow legislations such as GDPR?
Provide full transparency
Most people don’t mind sharing some personal information and view relevant advertising to get Wi-Fi access, learn more in this infographic about guest Wi-Fi in retail. To gain users’ trust it’s absolutely imperative you give them full transparency in exactly how you will use the collected information. They must also be able to change their consent for the usage of their personal data at any time. You must also give them the right to be forgotten and erased from your database.
If you have different login methods, collecting different data such as e-mail address and mobile number for different purpose can become complex. Add that your standard consent texts may change over time and soon you will have your hands full in just handling the user’s consents.
Complex reality calls for a simple solution
What could be more transparent and simple than letting the users handle their own privacy? Together with some of our largest customers we have defined and developed the Aptilo Service Management Platform™ (SMP) consent and personal data management solution. Soon it will also be available in the Aptilo Guest Wi-Fi Cloud™. With the Aptilo Privacy Self-Management™, the user will log-in to the self-care web portal using the same access method they used to access your Wi-Fi service. There they can handle their own personal data and consents.
Behind it all we have our brand-new consent management and personal data management functions.
Flexible consent management
The consent management features allow you or the users themselves to determine how you will process their personal data. Each consent is defined with a detailed terms text. Aptilo’s solution is also coupled to one or many access methods, such as Facebook login or click-and-connect. This means that the correct consent will always dynamically show up in the Aptilo SMP captive portal. The consent text can be multilingual where we use the correct language based on the browser language.
It is easy to handle a user’s consent over time with the Aptilo SMP consent management features. Revision-handling of changed consent improves traceability over time. The tight integration with the Aptilo captive portal makes collecting a user’s consent a breeze.
Smart consent pop-ups
The consent user interface comes in the form of a pop-up (safe from pop-up blockers). This serves three purposes. The detailed consent information is not visible from the start, which improves the sign-up rate as the users will not be discouraged from using the service. The important consent information is also more likely to be read by the user if it is clean and consistent in design. It allows you to add new consents and update existing consent texts without making any changes to the portal.
As discussed above, all consents coupled with the access method used will show up in the pop-up. The user can fold down the detailed terms for a consent with a simple click. This supports the requirement, in legislations such as GDPR, to give users explicit information on how their data will be used in a simple language. Gone are the long terms & conditions pages in “lawyerese” that nobody reads.
Personal data management
This is where we handle users’ personal data. Here you or the users themselves can view, correct, export and delete personal data.
This allows you to offer a Wi-Fi service compliant with legislations such as the GDPR. It provides total transparency with regards to what data you have stored about the user and how it will be used. It also supports the “forget me” action, erasing all information about the user.
Acting as an add-on to what you have
Using the Aptilo SMP or Aptilo Guest Wi-Fi Cloud™ is the simplest way to get the most out of our advanced consent and personal data management features. But, we can also act as an add-on to what you already have. Learn more of the different deployment scenarios.
