What’s New in WordPress Version 4.9.6
Video Transcript
In this WordPress version release, 4.9.6, there’s a major new set of tools added. Now as of May 25th, 2018, the European Union has implemented some strict rules regarding the personal data gathered on European citizens. Now you can and should learn more about the GDPR, but this video is about how WordPress has addressed these regulations. Oh, and by the way, this video does not contain legal advice. Any information provided in this video is for information purposes only and should not be deemed as legal advice in any way. Now, this class covers the new set of tools that will help your WordPress site comply with the new European regulations.
As soon as you update to version 4.9.6, just as with any other major update, you’re gonna be brought to this page here that kinda goes over some of the major items that have been added since the previous major update. Now technically, 4.9.6 is not considered a major updated, like 4.9 or 5.0, so you may have seen some of these items when we covered a previous update video. But definitely check these out.
The main thing I wanna cover are these three things. Under tools, you’ve got these two items: export personal data and erase personal data. Under settings, you’ve got this new item called privacy. Now the overall goal of this stuff is to protect privacy. With WordPress, this means one, spelling out in a privacy policy what and how you collect personal data. Two, allowing your site visitors to see the personal data you’ve collected on them. Three, allowing the site visitor to request that you change or delete that collected personal data. Four, requiring site visitors to opt into cookies instead of the cookies automatically being added to that visitor’s browser. That basically deals with that visitor posting comments.
Tackling these three items. First off, we wanna go to settings and privacy. The main thing we wanna do here is either add a privacy policy … If you already have one, select it from this dropdown here if it already isn’t pre-populated in there, then click on use this page. But let’s assume for a second that you do have a privacy policy, I would suggest going ahead and creating a new one. Don’t worry, it’s not gonna overwrite your existing one. It’s not even published by default, it’s set in draft mode. You still have to publish it if you’re gonna do that. What I would do is maybe go ahead and add to that title GDPR, so that you know the difference between the two. Maybe update the slug as well.
The reason I’m suggesting this is because WordPress has probably spent a few bucks on legal advice regarding the privacy policy and the stuff that should be in there. So I would even go to the point of comparing what they’ve got with what you already have, and adjust yours accordingly. Better than that, check out their guide, ’cause their guide is basically a replica of that privacy policy that was generated, but there’s additional suggestions of what items should be included in each of those little sections.
Now in relation to the other two items, the export personal data and erase personal data, there has to be a way in which the site visitor or user is aware of that. Since it’s kinda spelled out in this privacy policy that they’ve generated, and you wanna make sure that it’s spelled out in your privacy policy, whether you use this one or your original one. There should be a spot in here somewhere that alerts that user or site visitor how they can get in touch with you to find out about their personal data that you’ve collected. Find a spot in here, an ideal place would be somewhere down here where it’s talking about their data. Maybe put in some bold print, “To find out about your personal data, contact me here,” then put in either your email address or a link to your contact page. In either case, you’re gonna need their email address. Then here’s what we do.
Let’s go ahead and go to one of our users here. Let’s say Lex is here, let’s go with this one here. Lex has requested to find out about his personal data that we’ve been collected on him. So we’re gonna go to export personal data after they’ve already sent in their request to us. We’ll go to export personal data, enter their email address here or username, and then click on send request. Then this is populated saying it is pending. Lex was just sent an email. Let’s see if we can find Lex here. By the way, every time that I’ve tested this, it’s initially always ended up in the spam folder, so you might wanna add some language in the privacy policy about that too. That you might wanna check your spam or junk folder to find my reply to your request.
This is what it looks like. Howdy, a request has been made to perform the following action on your account: export personal data. To confirm this … ‘Cause they’ve gotta confirm that their email address is actually theirs. To confirm this, click on the following link. Boom. Thanks for confirming. Let’s go ahead and close this up. Now then, let’s come on back to our site and refresh this, ’cause right now it still says pending. This will update itself by the way, I’m just speeding the process up. So now then, it’s been confirmed. Now then, click on email data. Bing, bang, boom. That easy. You can also hover over the user’s name and download that personal data. If for some reason this status says pending for a long time, you can also check this box here, go to bulk actions and resend the email. Just select this and then click on apply.
But let’s come on back to the email. Open the new one up. Here is the export for their personal data. It comes in a zip file. Let’s go ahead and click on this, download it, and I’ll show you what it looks like. This is it here, not a big file. Of course it could be though, depending upon the activity that that user has done on your site. You might have a membership site and they’ve logged in several times. Maybe they are very active in the forum that you have on your site. Depending upon your site and the activity that they’ve done on your site, will depend on how big this file is and all the stuff that’s on it. This being a new demo site, there’s not gonna be a lot on this. But let’s open it up and find out. Even though I know the site, I’m gonna go ahead and scan it anyway, just habits. It’s an index.html, and here is the information.
Now, if we were requested by that user to erase that information, you’re not gonna get all of this stuff disappeared. You’re not going to delete the user, you’re just going to erase the information that can be erased. It does state in that privacy policy that there are some exceptions to what can be erased. In other words, some of this information will remain on your site. If you want, you could then delete that user completely, but that’s totally up to you.
Now I do wanna mention that you have these options here in the WordPress plugin repository, that if you go to wordpress.org, click on plugins, do a search for GDPR, you’ll find some items in here. This one is a good one that I’ve found, and this one here, the GDPR framework. The thing is though is that most of the items that are covered in these plugins are built into the core of WordPress. If they’re not built into the core of WordPress right now, eventually they will be. So if you don’t need to add a plugin, don’t add a plugin. But if you wanna check them out, by all means do so. I should also mention that there are some paid plugins that cover some of these items as well.
Well that’s gonna bring us to the end of this class on what’s new in the WordPress version 4.9.6. Thanks for checking it out, and you have a great day.