By now, you’ve likely seen or heard something about GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Your inbox probably also has at least one or two (thousand) messages from companies that you interact with, letting you know that they’ve updated their privacy policies as well as additional details regarding how they are complying.
Guess what? Here’s the same thing from your favorite Matterport + WordPress integration plugin, WP3D Models!
We’ll do our best to keep this short & sweet, but first an important disclaimer:
Legal Disclaimer: Due to the dynamic nature of websites, no plugin (including WP3D Models) can offer 100% legal compliance with various EU laws. Please consult a specialist internet law attorney to determine if you are in compliance with all applicable laws for your jurisdictions and your use cases.
As a website operator, it is solely your responsibility to ensure that you are in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations governing your use of our plugin.
WP3D Models, it’s owners/founders/employees/contractors, and other affiliated parties are not lawyers. Any advice given in our support, documentation, website, other mediums or through our services/products should not be considered legal advice and is for informational and/or educational purposes only and are not guaranteed to be correct, complete or up-to-date, and do not constitute creating/entering an Attorney-Client relationship.
WP3D Models Plugin
First and foremost, WP3D Models plugin & does not control or process any personal information collected or submitted online. For this reason, many of the stipulations of GDPR do not necessarily apply to using WP3D Models. The primary functionality offered by our software is the organization & curation of web pages (including single property web pages) that are built around other (external & embedded) content published on your own site/domain. WP3D Models makes it easy to organize and supplement your Matterport Tours (or other 360/3rd Party Embedded content & tours) with descriptive & SEO-friendly text, photos, video and floorplans as well as agent contact information & a lead generation tool.
Agent Content & Lead Generation
To be on the safe side (especially if your business interacts with customers in the EU) you may want to reach out to any “Agents” that you currently have published on your site. You’ll want to double check that you continue to have their consent to publish their information as part of your web pages.
In the future (when adding new “Agents”) you may also want to consider creating a form on your site to intake Agent information. It would be valuable if this form included a very specific “consent” checkbox that the agent would agree to, giving you permission to publish their info. This personal info includes, but is not limited to: their name, image, email address, & phone numbers.
Per the regulations of GDPR, you’ll also want to let them know (likely in your own UPDATED Privacy Policy) how to reach you if they’d like to have this personal information exported**, edited and or completely deleted from your own site.
(** The free WordPress plugin, WP All Export, offers an easy way to export all of your “Agent” data to a CSV File, making it very easy to provide this information to any agent who requests their information from you.)
WP3D Models Website
We’ve applied some of the same logic noted above and made a few changes to our own website & practices as well.
Specifically, we have:
- updated our Terms & Conditions, adding some additional information related to the GDPR.
- updated our Privacy Policy that clearly outlines the following:
- Information Collection, Use, and Sharing
- How we use Google Analytics
- Your Access to and Control Over Information
- Email Data Processing & Withdrawing Consent
- Data Retention
- Orders
- Form Submissions
- Software Licensing
- Payment Processing
- Links
- Embedded Content
- Security
- Cookies
- updated each of our intake forms to require explicit consent prior to submission as well as removed any/all associated IP address data.
- updated what information Google Analytics collects including:
- anonymized IP addresses on all Google Analytics hits, eCommerce hits, and form tracking hits
- disabled the Demographics and Interests Reports for Remarketing and Advertising tracking on Google Analytics hits
- disable UserID tracking on Google Analytics hits, eCommerce hits, form tracking hits, and the UserID dimension
- enabled the ga() compatibility mode
- added a new “notice bar” that appears for all site visitors asking for explicit cookie consent to use our website, including the ability to opt out of all cookies and providing a direct link to our Privacy Policy.
Whew, that’s the bulk of it, as far as GDPR & WP3D goes. We’re very pleased that such large strides are being made to protect user data and the privacy of users all over the Internet.
If you have any questions or would like more detail on any particular topic, please CONTACT US. Just be sure that you also check the box indicating that you provide consent to that information being submitted, collected and stored. 😉
Oh…and one more thing. Now that we’ve got these compliance issues sorted out, we can get back to developing new features for WP3D Models. Watch for a new version soon!