Data Privacy Automation: Most Needed Solution of the Time!

Data Privacy automation is the most needed solution of the time!

Do you know why? Ever come across accurate pop-ups and relevant ads for the thing that you have searched for online on a social media platform? Doesn’t it feel like we and our personal interests are being tracked and predicted by digital platforms? Of course! All our data is being collected and utilized for promotional purposes.

Does this happen with our consent? Maybe or maybe not! Yes, that is the catch here, sometimes it is you who affirms the platforms to get access to your private data; while in some cases, you are automatically into the trap of your data being used for creating targeted experiences though you intend not to share.

Data privacy is becoming a major concern in this millennium and hence is the rapidly expanding realm of data privacy regulations. It is overwhelming for the corporate/ privacy management teams to keep up with the fast-evolving compliance policies. Manual data privacy protection remains inefficient to scale with such evolving compliance requirements. Data privacy automation is the key to being able to adapt to these shifting regulatory landscapes according to the organization’s needs.

This blog aids you in knowing the importance of data privacy by highlighting the risks associated with data breaches. It also emphasizes enforcing data privacy automation to efficiently comply with the security policies.

What is Data Privacy?

Data privacy refers to the appropriate handling of user/ sensitive data that is collected, stored, analyzed, or processed for any of your business processes. Data privacy is an act involved in data protection where individuals have control over their data (how and what data can be collected, stored, and utilized).

This process ought to be proper and obliged to comply with legal requirements like GDPR, CCPA, CPPA, HIPAA, POPIA, or GLBA  as an act of data protection. To be simple, data privacy is the regulatory measure to make organizations abide by compliance and realize that they should care about consumer data and act responsibly about giving consumers their rights/choices about using/sharing/deleting the data upon request.

What is Data Privacy Management/Automation?

Knowing why privacy is so important will help you know the importance of data privacy automation. The use of technology to efficiently and effectively enforce and manage data privacy practices and strategies in an organization, is termed as data privacy automation.

Data privacy involves the implementation of data privacy policies with defined plans and strategies: adding automation techniques like workflows to the equation makes data privacy management effective and streamlined in your organization. Data privacy automation aids in streamlining the tasks involved in data privacy management and also in ensuring that those policies comply with legal regulations and individual privacy rights.

Data privacy automation streamlines the activities to protect user data so that the organization never fails to comply with the defined privacy regulations. Data privacy automation sheds light on a few aspects involved in data privacy management like individual rights on consent, purpose and data limitation, notice, and revealing identity.

Every user/ individual has their own privacy limits and organizations ought to respect them. Individuals can have control over their data being collected or utilized i.e. users have the right to provide informed consent on how their data should be collected, how it should be stored/processed, and for what, etc. 

Users also have controls to define the purpose of what their data is specific and legitimate to use.

They can also allow for minimal necessary or relevant data to be collected or detained. Individuals have the right to reveal their identity or not while data collection or utilized in other activities. In some cases, users have the right to access their private data and delete or edit them as they see fit.

Usually, data privacy is governed by legal regulatory bodies and not complying with them poses severe legal risks or penalties. There are multiple regulatory bodies across the world and it is a must for your organization to be compliant with the regulatory body in the country or region in which you are conducting your business. 

In general, every organization is expected to abide by both global and regional regulatory advisories. Here are some well-known regulatory bodies involved in data security or data privacy management.

GDPR– stands for General Data Protection Regulation and is primarily defined by the European Union (EU).  This legislative body provides guidance on how the data should be collected and processed.

HIPAA– stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This advisory was formulated in 1996 for the US region and specifically poses guidance over data regarding medical information.

OCC– stands for Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. This advisory body is formulated to oversee the execution of legal policies of the national banks in the US.

PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security which is a framework built to handle credit cards.

Key Components of Data Privacy Automation

Automated Data Mapping

For decades, there have been practices of manual data mapping which was a tiring process of filling numerous forms and checkboxes. Privacy is very important to be handled with checkboxes. Though there are aspects of checkbox compliance in manual data mapping like unsubscribing/opt-out, and managing the consent for cookies,  these serve as a necessary data protection measure it’s not sufficient in this data-rich world.

Automated systems help you differentiate the sensitive data in your data pools by looking into the context (while manual methods look into the content) and documenting them based on the individual’s preferences. Automation tools like workflow Apps help organizations build and maintain a comprehensive data collection where user consent over their data to be shared/deleted/sold is effectively taken care of.

Consent & Preference Management

Consent keeps privacy management alive. Getting consent from the user helps you build trust but automated systems extend this in a way of automating and providing dedicated mechanisms for every consent or preference. These automated systems eliminate confusion by capturing and recording consent, managing consent preferences, and providing mechanisms for individuals to revoke their consent if needed.

Data Protection & Privacy Impact Assessments ( DPIAs & PIAs): 

With these tech-enabled assessments, organizations identify and address privacy risks associated with new data entry in your data lakes and their changes. This automated assessment technique helps organizations address the issue of losing data that has occurred at multiple places or in multiple formats without the need for manual paper forms.

Data Subject Access Rights Management: 

Individual preferences vary from user to user and with the organization too. Some would prefer sharing their data with a third party while some like to delete the shared content. Such regulations aid organizations in granting the right to access, correct, delete, or restrict the processing of their personal data. Automating DSAR will free up resources and help them focus on other value-added tasks.

Privacy Policy/ Audits  Management:

An automated environment aids organizations in having control over their environment and staying up-to-date about regulatory requirements. The automated insights are so intuitive that aid organizations in maintaining transparency about their ongoing privacy policies, their version aiding individuals to stay up-to-date about their data handling. Automation in privacy audits is initiated with reports and insights over other data breaches and privacy-related incidents.

Automated systems aid organizations to proactively manage privacy risks, streamline privacy-related processes, and demonstrate process compliance with regulatory requirements. Such key features enable efficient and effective management of data privacy, reducing manual effort and improving overall data protection practices.

Importance of Data Privacy Automation

In this data-driven world, everyone is concerned about their data being mishandled or shared in the dark world. At this point, an organization that truly cares and takes ownership of user data privacy protection can stay on the top with the vigor of competitive excellence.

Apart from consumers being comfortable with such organizations sharing their data, the compliance regularities portray the laws that should be enforced to maintain trust at both ends.

Data is so dynamic that it becomes obsolete before you even start practicing the regulatory measure with manual protocols. Automation systems are structured and efficiently navigate through the implemented data privacy regulations on your premises. Data privacy automation helps to bid goodbye to fines, penalties, and sanctions for non-compliance. 

Manual data privacy practices are unviable with fast-changing data which can even damage your organization’s reputation by eroding customer trust making you lose business opportunities hindering your viable growth.

Violating a law can be easy but the outcome is not going to be easy to handle with legal penalties, huge settlements, or loss of your business license. The data privacy automation system works with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) so they are able to differentiate the sensitive data by knowing both the content and context. This can prevent organizations from dealing with any non-compliance risks that are capable enough to disrupt the business operation and limit growth and market access.

Implementing an effective data privacy automation system is the need of the hour to stay vibrant and build your business reputation.

Data Privacy Vs Data Security

Data privacy focuses on individual rights to their private data and takes effective measures to safeguard them. However, data security focuses on any vulnerabilities/threats or breaches of the data. Data security employs the required tools and techniques to avoid any unauthorized access to the data or misuse. It safeguards data against any vulnerability and strives to ensure confidentiality and integrity.

Here is an instance to help you better understand. You might have encountered a situation where your inbox is being bombarded with irrelevant ad campaigns/newsletters. And you realize there are no choices of opting out or unsubscribing? Do you realize what would be done before? Probably you could have shared your data with an organization that never cares about user privacy. But sometimes, the same scenario could be in control when you find an unsubscribe button or checkbox letting you give consent for how the data should be handled. Thanks to the data privacy regulations!

Some organizations even care to protect their user data from vulnerabilities and data breaches. They should encrypt all their sensitive data so any malware attacks would fail to capture and utilize such protected data. Thanks to data security compliance! 

Benefits of Automation of Data Privacy

With data privacy automation you are entitled to avail the benefits such as:

• Your organization is user-preferred in terms of data privacy and security.
• Comprehensive knowledge of the journey of the data throughout the organization.
• All the nuances of data privacy are documented and monitored. i.e. what is being collected, stored, shared, deleted, edited or even sold/purchased, and how is it handled? etc.
• Ensured data handling and its alignment with compliance policies and security measures.
• Automated data discovery to remediation for building a data-safe business model where data is assessed for risk and protection throughout its lifecycle to automate data privacy compliance model.
• Insights and reports on handled breaches and incidents so that you can automate redaction and segregate sensitive data from the data pool/lakes.

Best Practices in Implementing  Data Privacy Workflow Solutions

Privacy workflow solutions enable businesses to keep up pace with the implemented regulatory measures and mitigate their financial rivals from government investigations and fines. Automated privacy workflow solutions facilitate easy and deeper audit trails with proper tracking and insightful reports on your data privacy practices.

• Specify your data privacy and security policies aligning with the regulatory measures and let the privacy workflow(automation) spin the wheel for the rest.
• Ensure the privacy policies adhere to both global and regional/local regulatory laws. Build a model where neither data privacy nor data security is compromised.
• Check the data privacy readiness of your model. 
• Score your model on some criteria like user content/ notice for cookies, risk management, data access request, right to be forgotten, data sharing control, PII management (Personal Identifiable Information), and data processing record management.
• Make sure the automated system is autonomous to build customer trust and adhere to regulatory requirements.
• Build an automated privacy workflow that automates data discovery, data security enforcement, and safe sharing, and takes account of sensitive/ customer volunteered data without failing to impose the individual’s preferences. 
• Make your workforce aware of the implemented privacy regulation and the privacy workflow and train them accordingly.
• Enforce RBAC (Role Based Access Control) and zero trust policy to avoid any security threats from inside or outside the organization.
• Keep all the tools and software updated with security measures like multi-factor authentication to keep away from malware, spyware, etc
• Specify clear roles and responsibilities to impart the privacy policies efficiently and encourage regular backups to avoid data loss.

Cflow in Data Privacy Automation

Cflow is a cloud-based workflow solution that can help you build solid data privacy policies as per your privacy regulations. Cflow offers a wide variety of features to aid you in achieving the highest degree of reliability and data security. 

• The dynamic workflows help you design workflows based on user preference (user-defined rules) to enforce privacy/risk assessment, maturity assessment, and incident management. 
• Experience best encryption techniques as data is secured when static on the move, or accessed in different devices.
• Users can define what data ought to be encrypted with SSL encryption and is hosted on the AWS cloud to defend against any unethical hacking attempts.
• Best-in-class security with multi-factor authentication and password expiry timelines or non-repeatable passwords.
• 24*7 active physical servers on the cloud or on-premise with a huge backup configuration.

The intuitive user interface and no-code workflow builder with drag-and-drop feature enable you to build the data privacy framework that you have envisaged for years. The data integration is so simple and unauthorized third party access is denied with your user-defined custom rules with  Cflow’s rules engine. The data mapping and visualization with the automated workflows are simple with customizable forms and cloud-based data log management. Version control is exemplary with access control and permissions, all defined by your rules.

Wrapping Up

Choosing the right fit workflow solution and implementing an automation system for data privacy requires much care and attention since there are risks when your data or user data is shared with a third-party website. In that case, you cannot expect that third-party site to adhere to the regulatory measures you abide by and also you can’t stop sharing data with them in many business processes like purchase and procurement. So, a workflow solution like Cflow should be your choice for data privacy automation. Sign up now to experience real data privacy!