Is Your Business At Risk? Learn How To Protect Yourself With Our Data Privacy Impact Assessment Tutorial

In today’s digital age, data has become the new currency. Companies collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of customer data to improve their business processes, gain a competitive edge, and deliver better customer experiences. However, with the increased use of technology comes increased risk, and businesses that fail to protect their customer data may face severe consequences. The Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA) is a valuable tool that can help businesses identify and mitigate data privacy risks. In this tutorial, we will explain what DPIA is, how it works, and how it can help your business protect itself.

What Is Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA)?

A DPIA is a systematic process that helps organizations identify, assess, and mitigate or minimize data protection risks. It is a mandatory process under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for businesses that process personal data that could result in high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals. However, even if your business is not subject to GDPR, conducting a DPIA can help you identify potential risks and take measures to prevent them.

A DPIA involves a comprehensive review of your business processes, the personal data you collect, and how you use and store it. It helps businesses identify and assess potential risks to data privacy and consider ways to reduce or eliminate those risks. The output of a DPIA is a report that provides recommendations on how your business can improve its privacy controls and processes.

How Does Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA) Work?

The DPIA process involves five steps:

1. Identify The Need For A DPIA

The first step is to determine whether a DPIA is necessary for your business. Organizations should conduct a DPIA when planning to introduce new data processing activities or make significant changes to existing ones. The DPIA should be carried out early in the planning process to identify privacy risks and ensure they are addressed before implementing new processes.

2. Describe The Processing Activities

The next step is to describe the data processing activities in detail. This includes identifying what personal data is involved, how it is collected and processed, who has access to it, and why it is needed. It may be helpful to create a data flow diagram to visualize the processing activities and identify potential risks.

3. Evaluate The Necessity And Proportionality

The third step involves evaluating the necessity and proportionality of the processing activities. This means assessing whether the processing is necessary to achieve the intended purpose and whether it is proportionate to the risks involved. This step also involves identifying any less intrusive alternatives to the processing.

4. Assess The Risks To Data Privacy

The fourth step involves assessing the risks to data privacy. This includes identifying potential risks and evaluating their likelihood and impact. Risks include unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, loss, or destruction of personal data. This step also considers the potential harm to individuals if these risks materialize.

5. Identify And Evaluate Measures To Mitigate Risks

The final step involves identifying and evaluating measures to mitigate risks. This includes evaluating the effectiveness of existing controls and identifying additional measures that can be implemented to reduce or eliminate risks. These measures should be proportionate to the likelihood and impact of the risks.

Conclusion

Data privacy is essential for any business that collects, stores, and uses personal data. Conducting a DPIA can help your business identify potential privacy risks and take measures to prevent them. By following the five-step process outlined in this tutorial, your business can improve its privacy controls and processes and minimize the risk of data breaches and privacy violations. So, take the first step today and conduct a data privacy impact assessment for your business.

For the individual person, the GDPR grants several rights with regards to the processing and movement of personal data, including: mandatory consent before collecting, storing and processing personal information; access and portability of personal data; data breach notifications; and the right to be forgotten, amongst others. As for the companies that must comply with this new regulation, there is no shortage of challenges, including the execution of a data protection impact assessment (DPIA).

DPIA — Data Protection by Design and by Default

One of the key elements of GDPR is requiring the implementation of appropriate technical and organizational controls to enforce the data protection principles and safeguard individual rights. In fact, this concept is not new, and is commonly referred to as “privacy by design” or, most recently, as “data protection by design and by default.” The real change is the fact that with the GDPR in effect, this is now a legal requirement. The data protection impact assessment (DPIA), also known as Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), is an integral part of the “data protection by design and by default” approach. As pointed out in GRPR Article 35, a DPIA is necessary when the type of processing is likely to result in a high-risk situation for the rights and freedoms of natural persons, including the use of new technologies, automatic systematic processing and evaluation of personal information, large-scale monitoring of a publicly-accessible area, and large-scale processing of sensitive data like biometrics. To put it simply, the idea behind the DPIA is to create a process for systematically and comprehensively analyzing data processing, so as to identify and minimize data-protection risks.

How to Conduct a Data Privacy Impact Assessment

While the GDPR does not directly specify the DPIA process step by step, it allows for organizations to use a framework that complements their existing working practices. For example, adopting the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is a great approach. The basic steps are:

1. Identifying the Need for a DPIA

The best moment to conduct a DPIA is as early as possible within any new project life cycle. This way, it will be easier for your company to incorporate any findings and recommendations into the design of the processing operation.  It is important to remember that a DPIA is only mandatory in specific cases where data processing is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. The GDPR explicitly mentions three primary conditions when the DPIA is necessary:

A systematic and extensive evaluation of personal aspects relating to natural persons which is based on automated processing, including profiling, and on which decisions are based that produce legal effects concerning the natural person or similarly significantly affect the natural person Processing on a large scale of special categories of data, or of personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences A systematic monitoring of a publicly-accessible area on a large scale

2. Describing the Information Flow

Once you confirm the DPIA is mandatory, the next step is describing the information flow. For instance, it is necessary to provide details on how the information within the processing operation is collected, stored, used and disposed.

As mentioned before, the idea of the DPIA is to understand and reduce data privacy risks to an acceptable level. This will require a clear view of all threats and vulnerabilities for the data processing operation and should result in a risk catalog including both the likelihood and the severity of any impact on the rights and freedoms of individuals whose data you collect and/or process.

4. Identifying Data Protection Solutions to Reduce or Eliminate the Risks

After creating your risk catalog, the next logical step is identifying the necessary protection solutions to reduce or eliminate the risks. In other words, your company should define controls to either mitigate, avoid, transfer or accept the risks. As with any risk-management approach, for most cases it will not be necessary to completely extinguish a specific risk; the idea is reducing its likelihood and impact to acceptable levels.

5. Sign Off the Outcomes of the DPIA

After risk decisions are taken, it is necessary to create a record of the DPIA outcomes and have it signed off by the parties responsible for the mentioned decisions. It is important to remember that when a high-level risk that was identified cannot be mitigated, the organization must submit the DPIA to the regulatory authority for consultation before processing.

6. Integrate Data Protection Solutions Into the Project

As a last step, it is necessary to make sure the DPIA outcomes, such as security controls, are completely integrated into your project. Consider reviewing and revisiting the DPIA when necessary, especially in cases where there is a meaningful change to your project.

Conclusion

Leaving GRPR requirements aside for just a moment, adopting a “data protection by design and by default” approach is a smart strategy for any company, and its benefits extend far beyond simple regulation compliance. Potential risks and other problems can be identified at a very early stage, which in turn will make addressing these situations both simpler and less expensive. It will also result in an increased level of privacy and data protection awareness across the organization, reducing the probability of breaching regulations such as the GDPR and avoiding significant financial and/or reputational impact. Conducting a DPIA is not a simple task. It should be done by professionals with sufficient expertise and knowledge of the project in question and use the advice from your appointed data protection officer (DPO). So if your staff does not possess sufficient the necessary experience, your best bet is investing in training or using external specialists to consult on or to carry out the DPIA. REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL, EUR-Lex Art. 35 GDPR – Data protection impact assessment, Intersoft Consulting