Embedding Privacy into Business Operations 

 

The Challenge: Balancing Privacy and Efficiency 

In today's digital world, organizations face a dual challenge: complying with increasingly complex global privacy regulations and managing growing volumes of personal information and sensitive data efficiently.  Privacy Automation emerges as a powerful way, leveraging technology and process management to streamline privacy practices and embed privacy into the day-to-day operation of the organisation. 

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Privacy Automation doesn't exist in isolation. It builds upon a foundation of understanding your personal information (PI) and sensitive data landscape, as described in our previous section on Data Governance. Once you know what PI and sensitive data you collect and hold from whom, as well as your privacy obligations, automation of operational practices can streamline privacy management across your organisation. 

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Privacy obligations can be driven by diverse legal frameworks depending on where your potential customer reside. Different jurisdictions have varying data protection laws and regulations, such as the Privacy Act in Australia, the GDPR in the EU/UK, the CCPA in California, the FADP in Switzerland and the LGPD in Brazil.  Navigating competing legal frameworks can be complex, requiring businesses to understand and comply with multiple sets of regulations simultaneously and design their internal processes accordingly. 

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In addition, cultural norms and language barriers can affect data protection practices and communication strategies across borders.  Data Protection Authorities from different countries, including individual members states of the EU, have their own procedures and requirements for communication and reporting including for time sensitive activities such as data breach notifications, making the application of consistent internal policies and procedures challenging.    

 

An aspect of compliance is to manage  privacy collection of personal information and associated consent along with the handling of customer requests associated with their data should be integrated with the data governance capability (which identifies all PI) and can support automated responses and request management. 

Additionally, as changes occur, or new products are created the organisation should ensure that the privacy posture is continually improved and that new privacy risks are not being introduced.  

 

Here's how it works: 

Leveraging Data Discovery: Automation tools can analyse your data to identify and classify personal information and sensitive information. This is then used to inform other key activities to determine the level of risk and associated mitigation activities including: 

• Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs): These assessments evaluate the privacy risks associated with data collection and processing activities. Automation streamlines this process and allows for earlier identification of potential issues. 

• Access Controls: Automation can restrict access to sensitive data based on pre-defined roles and permissions. This ensures that only authorized individuals can access specific data. 

• Integrate Privacy with other systems: Privacy Automation can be integrated with existing systems/processes including IT risk management, compliance tracking, and consent management, ensuring that a holistic approach to privacy and data protection is being taken.  

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Benefits of Privacy Automation 

Implementing Privacy Automation offers several benefits: 

• Enhanced Efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks like PIAs and access controls frees up valuable resources for other critical activities. 

• Improved Compliance: Automation ensures consistent application of privacy controls, reducing the risk of human error and non-compliance. 

• Increased Trust: Organizations can build stronger customer relationships by demonstrating a commitment to responsible data handling. 

 

Taking Action: Implementing Privacy Automation 

Here are some key steps organisations can leverage technology take to deliver Privacy Automation: 

• Privacy by Design: Integrate privacy considerations into the early stages of product development. Automation tools can help assess potential privacy impacts and enforce privacy-friendly settings by default. 

• Automated PIA/Risk Assessments: Deploy automated software to conduct regular PIAs and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) for changes and new products appropriate to the level of privacy risk. This allows for proactive identification and mitigation of privacy risks. 

• Data Subject Rights Fulfilment: Automate the processing of data subject requests, such as access, rectification, and deletion requests by linking the requests directly to the personal information holding of that individual (through data governance). This ensures timely, complete and consistent responses, fostering consumer trust and reducing response effort. 

• Consent (and Preference) Management, Cookie Consent: Use tools to capture and manage consent and preferences from customers and ensure that is applied to the storage, use and retention of personal information. This ensures data collection and processing aligns with user consent. 

• Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Leverage automated solutions that track compliance against regulations (e.g. Cth. Privacy Act 1988) and frameworks (e.g. ISO27701) to provide visibility of continually improvement of privacy controls. This helps organisations stay compliant with evolving standards and regulations. 

• Multi-jurisdictional Automation – specialist products and services can support compliance with non-domestic data protection laws.  Leveraging these allows you to achieve compliance for specific jurisdictions at a fraction of the cost of utilising internal resources. An example of this may be obtaining  a privacy representative service and product to handle communications with data subject and supervisory authorities in those jurisdictions.   

 
By implementing Privacy Automation into the business and technology operations, you can streamline privacy management, enhance compliance, and build customer trust.  Contact us today to discuss how relevant technologies can help you automate your privacy program and achieve these goals!