This new law demands you set up "reasonable" safeguards to protect the information you hold against theft, loss, and hacking.
It does not matter if it's lost, stolen or hacked.
This new law applies to each person or business that stores any information about clients, employees, suppliers, pupils, members, patients, ...
Government does not need huge resources to police the Act or to check whether your business complies or not. They've solved this by making it self-policing. If you lose data, you must report it yourself.
Consider what you must report to the Information Regulator.
Anything containing or allowing access to customer or employee or supplier data:
Failing to prove this leads to immense admin, big fines, and even prison time.
That's on top of the costs of fixing the problem after the event.
Knowing the problems is the first step toward compliance. (How can we know what to solve if we don't know what the problems are?)
I'm Peter Carruthers.
I've helped more than 50,000 small-business owners prosper despite their business challenges.
This was via thousands of individual consultations and hundreds of live seminars.
I've produced dozens of courses since I took all my business efforts online in 2004. I've presented thousands of live webinars. I still consult each day with individual business owners.
In 2005 I wrote the world's best-selling book on surviving business closure. It's called CrashProof your Business.
The book was the result of closing South Africa's third-most admired IT supplier in 1992. This was in the run-up to the '94 elections when we all feared civil war.
I lost everything. And then some. I came out of the experience with an intense need to find out where I went wrong. And then to share that knowledge.
I have more than 5000 students online. And more than 1000 on this POPI course.
You're in safe hands.
Hi. Just a light note about this free course.
I created this for small business owners. Not for their staff. A business owner runs a series of risks that people with jobs don't face. So this material is designed to identify and manage those risks. And to see whether the business owner needs to continue into the full Monty of POPI Compliance.
Employees would be much better off doing our Staff Privacy Program. That's not free. But it is not expensive. And I offer big discounts for more than one employee. Each staff member gets a completion certificate at the end.
Check out the Privacy Awareness course here.
And check if the big discounts are still here.
More than 1,000 small-business owners have already taken this foundation course.
Every small-business must comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act.
Nearly all the available training is expensive. It's offline, so it needs venues and live presenters. Both are expensive. As is your cost and time to get to those venues.
Almost all prevailing training focuses on bigger firms. They face more complex problems than we do. (And they have much more money to spend on solving them.)
This free online course will show you the obstacles each small business faces. You'll learn enough to make much better choices to resolve your own POPI challenge.