GDPR / POPI Query

[sahostking]

Hi

I understand EU has the GDPR law. In South Africa we have a POPI Act which is very similar.

Now my understanding is whmcs has a feature to clear old "inactive" users from a whmcs system.

If we use mailchimp which syncs contacts with whmcs. Does it now make those contacts in the mailchimp list "unsubscribed".

Reason I ask this is if they are still "subscribed" even though their account details have been deleted. How do we as a company prove if we still marketing to those email addresses that were synced that they "opted in" in the first place as the profile will not be available anymore to see the consent history tab?

They could obviously then get us fined as we have nothing to back up that they were our customer for a certain period of time. Note we plan on deleting customer accounts that are inactive for older than 1 year.

 

Thanks

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

2 minutes ago, sahostking said:

Hi

I understand EU has the GDPR law. In South Africa we have a POPI Act which is very similar.

Now my understanding is whmcs has a feature to clear old "inactive" users from a whmcs system.

If we use mailchimp which syncs contacts with whmcs. Does it now make those contacts in the mailchimp list "unsubscribed".

Reason I ask this is if they are still "subscribed" even though their account details have been deleted. How do we as a company prove if we still marketing to those email addresses that were synced that they "opted in" in the first place as the profile will not be available anymore to see the consent history tab?

They could obviously then get us fined as we have nothing to back up that they were our customer for a certain period of time. Note we plan on deleting customer accounts that are inactive for older than 1 year.

 

Thanks

Unfortunately - WHMCS doesn't even do GDPR correctly in my opinion! So if they can't do local taxation and privacy laws correctly I doubt SA is going to be done well! 

You're correct though, You could end up fined or worse through the poor implementation of WHMCS "features" aka bugs to most billing systems. I don't use Mailchimp personally but would suggest making a test user to see if it is indeed syncing the data or like most WHMCS systems a one way data dump.  It's a very important issue I've bought up with support on 7 occaisions but never recieved a response other that "see our documention" which I assume is to avoid liability when their customers are being dragged through court.