GDPR and Email Retention

Looking into GDPR compliance for email retention and archiving


GDPR has become a tremendous force in the data privacy compliance spectrum, with over 50 massive fines since its introduction in 2018, each costing tens of millions of euros to the defaulters. And now that Australia, Canada, China, and India have joined the compliance club, organizations around the globe must be more attentive to how they handle, process, and retain data, including email, to avoid high fines and other legal penalties resulting from GDPR noncompliance.


Even though the GDPR does not mention email compliance expressly in its text, it is one of the most prevalent forms of electronic communication for handling personal data, making it subject to GDPR laws and compliance. Additionally, since the average employee sends and receives 126 business emails each day — a lot of data, including personal data, traveling back and forth — establishing company-wide email standards is crucial to ensure compliance. Discover more about who does GDPR applies to.


The idea of processing personal data is one of the most mentioned aspects of GDPR. Here, processing refers to a broad range of actions conducted on personal data, such as collection, change, and data storage.


According to GDPR Article 5(1)(e), personal data shall be kept in a form that allows identification of data subjects for no longer than is required for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. The emphasis here is no longer necessary, which means it's a good idea to develop the practice of wiping personal data or using data archiving solutions when your company no longer requires it.


However, when it comes to email, this is sometimes easier said than done as employees may not understand what constitutes personal data, or they may simply forget to delete emails containing personal data. In any such instance, your organization would be subject to GDPR noncompliance, or worse, if a data breach occurs. Furthermore, certain emails may need to be kept providing an audit trail or to be recreated for an early case assessment in response to an eDiscovery request or current litigation.


For the former, make sure your company has solid corporate email archiving and retention rules in place and that your staff follows them to the letter. It is also essential to invest in an email archiving platform for the latter so that you may safely preserve business-critical emails for extended periods.


Another consideration with GDPR and email retention is the right to be forgotten, which refers to a data subject's right to seek from the controller, without undue delay, the deletion of personal data related to them. A data subject's right to be forgotten can be exercised in various circumstances. Following such a request, failing to remove a data subject's personal data without undue delay might find your company in hot water.


Finally, there's the issue of erasure itself. The procedure of wiping personal data, like everything else linked to GDPR, is highly controlled. When disposing of data, you must either delete or anonymize it to stay compliant. The former is relatively self-explanatory: to destroy data, you must wipe all physical and digital copies of it. This is easier said than done with digital material, so be thorough while going through old files and archives to remove any traces of it.


By comparison, anonymization is a little more perplexing. Data turned anonymous in such a way that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable is what anonymized data refers to. The problem is that many companies confuse anonymization with pseudonymization, which is defined as the processing of personal data so that the personal data cannot be traced to a specific data subject without the use of additional information. If you choose the wrong one, you risk noncompliance.


To safeguard your company, it's a good idea to provide clear guidelines in your GDPR email retention policy on how staff should dispose of data.

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