The
Grid.
CONFERENCE OF CREATIVES
PRIVACY IMPACT ASSESSMENT
A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is an analysis of how personal information is collected, used, shared, and maintained within the company. The Privacy Impact Assessment captures potential risks or vulnerabilities and the likelihood of these vulnerabilities to occur in a system. The purpose of a PIA is to demonstrate how privacy protections have been consciously incorporated at the system level and across the company throughout the information life cycle.
What is the need for PIA?
Maintaining a privacy risk register and evaluating overall privacy maturity are necessary components to measure and manage the privacy and data ethics within the organization.
Privacy and security of personal information are the most important factors in today’s data-driven world. While organizations consciously make the effort to protect information, it is difficult to determine how personal information will get impacted because of a project or a process.
Even a minor modification in a product/program could have a significant impact on privacy. Conducting a PIA helps in identifying the risks and implementing the necessary controls to mitigate those risks. A PIA demonstrates the organization’s efforts towards the protection of personal information and reinforces its commitment to consumer privacy.
How is PIA Conducted?
A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a formal analysis of how an organization collects, uses, shares, and maintains personal information (PI). The assessment helps to identify and mitigate privacy risks, ensuring compliance with laws (CCPA, GDPR, CPA etc.). Many states require a PIA for high risk processing activities, documenting data flows, assessing potential impacts, and planning safeguards throughout a system's lifecycle to protect individuals' privacy rights.
Technology can greatly assist Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA)
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Pre-defined Templates
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Automated Workflows, Gather Details required for Assessment
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Track and Monitor Progress. Prioritize
and Remediate
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Assess, Score and Measure Impact
Simplify PIA with Meru Data
Our Data Map completely integrates with existing and new systems. Information submitted via the questionnaire, information collected via the Data Map, and data gathered from information disclosed by vendors can all be combined and presented in a meaningful format to conduct the Privacy Impact Assessment. All the details related to personal information—including types, usage, location, data transfers, level of access, regulatory requirements, retention periods, and more—are made available to the privacy team performing the assessment. This enables easy identification of risks associated with system or processing activity in question.
Demonstrate Compliance
The primary purpose of a PIA is to demonstrate that an organization has consciously incorporated privacy protections throughout the development lifecycle, ensures compliance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements, and builds public trust through transparency. Our tool displays how the personal information in the system was collected and how it is being used within the organization to enable:
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Processing of data for the purpose that it was collected
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Use of data based on the received consent
Identify Risks
The level of risk across all systems can be quantified in a consistent manner based on the data stored in each system and its usage.
The assessment evaluates how the data is being processed in a given context and identifies the inherent risks. Each risk is then analyzed to determine its severity, probability, and potential impact, which is then compared against existing risk controls and measures to identify the residual risks.
Based on this evaluation, an action plan is drafted to ensure the implementation of the required controls to address the residual risks. The PIA also ensures that the implemented controls are commensurate with the inherent data risk, the criticality of the system, and consistent with the risk exposure of the systems.
Our Core Beliefs
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Data is an asset for organizations
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Companies should be both data-wise and privacy-conscious: It is indeed possible to both use data to personalize experiences for customers and ensure privacy at the same time
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Privacy compliance is complex. But it can be simplified and managed with the right processes and technology
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Sustainable privacy programs require robust Information Governance. Data needs to be governed and managed from creation to deletion