The European Smooth project coordinated by the Eurecat technology centre has opened a call for applications until 30 January addressed to small businesses to assess their compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) free of charge and also get tips on how to enhance their data processing.
The project “is aimed at the small business segment to help them check that they are complying with data protection regulations simply and efficiently using a questionnaire which contains all the GDPR’s requirements,” says Joan Mas, director of Eurecat’s Digital Technologies Division.
This call is part of the project’s market pilot and “provides small businesses with the cloud-based platform which has been developed building on frontier technologies such as machine learning and data mining to help them self-assess compliance with the GDPR more easily,” notes Rosa Maria Araujo, the Smooth project’s coordinator. “It additionally furnishes guidance and suggestions to businesses in any industry.”
The tool “helps to work around the challenges posed by the technical requirements and resources needed to meet GDPR obligations for SMEs and especially for the smallest ones, the micro-enterprises,” she adds.
The platform crafted as part of the project analyses the information provided and the legal documents and databases uploaded by businesses to it in real time. It consists of three modules: ‘Smootext’, which screens documents concerning the privacy protection process of small and medium-sized enterprises such as their privacy policy and cookie policy; ‘Smoodata’, which scans databases to look for personal data; and ‘Smonline’, which checks for third-party cookies on websites and in mobile apps which might be receiving data unbeknownst to the business owner. The results of these tools are compiled in a report which is generated automatically and sent to the user as a PDF file.
The platform is available in Spanish, English, Latvian and Italian and other languages are to be added.
Smooth has also released its GDPR Handbook available on the website and as a mobile app which features information, examples, videos and links to external resources.
Smooth is a European Horizon 2020 project led by Eurecat involving twelve partners from six European countries (Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Poland, Latvia and France) and bringing together experts in the GDPR, data protection agencies, representatives of European small businesses, large companies, research and innovation institutions, an SME and a standardisation body.
