Today’s business must maintain compliance with a bevy of local and international laws aimed at protecting individual data rights. The processes and activities that support this are grouped into the discipline experts call privacy managment.
Privacy regulations can be a challenge for businesses to comply with, but done properly, they can also help bring in new customers and partners. This article will discuss the major areas to address when setting up and executing your company’s privacy management program.
Privacy management is about more than just adhering to regulations and keeping up with changing privacy legislation; it’s about ensuring that your business is running securely and smoothly. Managing this requires teams to be in place to carry out important functions, such as preparing privacy notices, responding to subject rights requests (SRRs), performing risk assessments, conducting impact assessments and many more. Leaving these tasks to manual systems can lead to human errors and missed deadlines, which can result in costly fines, lawsuits and reputational damage.
Accountability is a core element of privacy management, which involves proving that your business has followed stringent practices about how it collects, stores and uses data. It’s about being able to prove this in the event of an audit or investigation by a regulatory body. This includes having clear consent management processes, ensuring that any personal information collected is being processed for the legitimate purposes you say it will be, and demonstrating that you have a lawful reason to process data (e.g., performance of a contract, compliance with legal obligation or protection of vital interests).
Some privacy laws require that personal data be kept within the country in which it was collected. This is a requirement known as data localization and is often a condition of the use of standard contractual clauses (SCCs) or binding corporate rules (BRC). A privacy management system should track data transfers and ensure that you adhere to any country restrictions.
A final element of privacy management is maintaining communications privacy, which means making sure that personal information you communicate with people isn’t being used for inappropriate or illegal purposes. This includes not sharing your customer’s Social Security numbers or addresses with third parties and only communicating with them for the purposes you’ve specified in contracts, marketing emails and other communications.
Developing an effective privacy management program takes a lot of time, effort and resources. For this reason, it’s a good idea to implement a privacy management software solution that can automate these processes, provide visibility and help you streamline your compliance operations. TrustArc is one such product, and it offers features that are designed to be customizable and easily integrated with your existing business processes. They include workflow automation to manage policy compliance, reporting capabilities to track changes in your policies over time, and analytics that can help you identify potential risks of your company’s data handling practices. It also comes with a knowledgeable and friendly customer support team that can assist you with any issues at any stage of your implementation process.
