Nowadays organizations are getting an increasing amount of data, coming from many websites and electronic devices, which they are using for their business benefits. The data storage moves from local infrastructures to clouds and virtual data centers.

The benefits of a vast amount of data come with the obligations for ensuring data privacy like compliance with privacy laws and ensuring users’ trust in your company. To comply with data privacy laws and retain users’ trust, organizations need to create and implement a secure and flexible data privacy management system. Read this article to learn more about why to implement a data privacy management system and how to do it correctly.

What is Data Privacy Management?

Data privacy management comprises the rules, policies, and technical solutions used by organizations to assess their data processing activities and ensure personal data collection and management in compliance with privacy laws.

Organizations must set the rules for the collection, storage, processing, and sharing of personal data, fulfill the privacy rights of individuals, perform a risk assessment, train personnel, and perform other actions to comply with applicable privacy laws and regulations. These functions could be done by multiple teams and departments within the company, that should share mutual practices and privacy standards. Thus, an automated privacy management system is the only feasible solution to implement uniform data privacy policies and comply with required privacy laws.

Why Establish a Data Privacy Management System?

A good and reliable data privacy management system helps to perform the following tasks:

• Compliance with regulations. First, users’ data privacy is strictly regulated by privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR, UK’s DPA 2018, US’s CCPA, VCDPA, CPA, and others. Non-compliance can lead to financial penalties. Recently, many technology companies have been charged for breaches of the GDPR.
• User trust and loyalty. Second, adequate data management increases users’ trust in companies. The number of internet users, concerned about their data privacy, is constantly growing. A responsible attitude towards users’ personal data privacy helps to retain user trust and loyalty.
• Mitigating data breaches and security risks. A strong privacy management system helps to protect both the organization and its customers from data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive personal information.
• Prevention of reputational loss. Due to reputational loss, consumers could leave the business or switch to other service providers. It is easier to recover money than a reputation, and data leaks could eventually lead to financial damages. Thus, businesses should prevent reputational loss.
• Enhanced user experience. Organizations, providing clear rules and transparency about data collection and management practices, provide enhanced user experience and thus get users’ trust. When users control their data in a way that aligns with their expectations, it gives an advantage to the company.
• Reduced number of errors. Teams within an organization perform many tasks regarding personal data management, including management of data inventory, ensuring effective access controls, preparing privacy notices, conducting risk assessments, informing consumers about breach notifications, and more. Managing data manually simply could result in human errors. Thus, a robust and automated data privacy management system is needed to prevent errors.

Requirements and Regulations for Data Privacy Management

Compliance with privacy laws is an important task of data privacy management. There are many aspects to follow to satisfy the following data privacy principles.

Data processing principles

Businesses must ensure that their data processing activities are in accordance with data privacy regulations. There are the principles regarding data processing for most data privacy laws:

• Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency. Privacy laws state that organizations must collect and process users’ data in a lawful, fair, and transparent way. They should have a legal basis for collecting data. Transparency means that organizations disclose their privacy policies, they should be easily accessible and written in clear and understandable language. Organizations must disclose their practices for collecting, storing, and processing users’ data.
• Purpose limitation. Organizations must have a legitimate purpose for collecting, storing, and processing users’ data.
• Data minimization. Organizations must collect and use only the minimal amount of relevant data that is enough to achieve the business purposes of the organizations.
• Accuracy. Organizations must check for the correctness and completeness of users’ data. If the data is not accurate, then it must either be deleted or corrected.
• Storage limitation. Organizations must store users’ data only as long as it is needed for the business purposes of the organizations. The data must be deleted after achieving the data processing purpose.
• Storage safety. Organizations must protect users’ data from unauthorized access and data leaks.
• Accountability. Organizations must document data processing activities and store this data for proof of compliance.

Data subject rights

Data subjects have the rights to know and control their personal data. To comply with the the GDPR, users must have the following rights:

• Right to be informed.
• Right to data access.
• Right to data rectification.
• Right to data erasure.
• Right to restrict processing.
• Right to data portability.
• Right to object.
• Rights around automated decision-making and profiling.

Legal basis for processing

Organizations must have a legal basis or a legitimate interest for data processing. Legitimate interest is one of the key concepts under the GDPR and other privacy laws. Even if you consider data processing to be necessary for your business activities, legitimate interests must respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals.

In general, legitimate interests can be either personal, commercial, or societal interests. To have a legal basis for data management, organizations must ensure one of these reasons:

1. Consent. If users give explicit consent to process their data, it is a valid clue and a legal basis for data processing. Consent to be valid, it must be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. Make sure that you respect individuals’ rights as exceptions to consent and the right to withdraw consent.
2. Performance of a contract. If you have a contract or agreement between your organization and the user, you can process a user’s data based on this contract.
3. Legal obligations. You can also process a user’s data to keep legal requirements for your organization. For example, you need to inform the local tax authorities about your employees’ salaries or sick leaves.
4. Vital interests. Another legal basis for data processing for organizations is the vital interest of an individual or the interest of another natural person For example, users’ health data could be processed to save their life in an emergency situation.
5. Public interests. It means that data could be processed to protect the welfare of the general public, under the governance of official authority.
6. Legitimate interests. You can also process personal data in various other cases when they serve legitimate interests when the data processing is necessary, proportionate to its purposes, and performed in the least intrusive manner.

Data Privacy Management Tools

The safest way to implement data privacy management and comply with data privacy laws is to use a Consent Management Platform (CMP) for your website or mobile application. A CMP is a specialized software solution that enables organizations to collect, manage, and store user consent for data processing activities.

Use CookieScript Consent Management Platform for the data privacy management of your website, mobile app, or IoT device. It will help you to manage users’ data professionally and to comply with the privacy laws.

CookieScript CMP has the following functionalities:

1. Consent collection and management. CookieScript CMP provides a user-friendly interface to obtain explicit user consent for gradual and specific data processing activities and document these consents for proof of compliance.
2. Data sharing management. Users can customize their data sharing preferences. They can control the types of data collected and give consent for data sharing separately for different types of data. This helps to enhance transparency and build users’ trust.
3. Consent storage management. When organizations obtain initial consent, it must be renewed after a year or so. Users could also revoke their consent at any time. CookieScript CMP allows you to perform all these tasks regarding the storage of user consent.
4. Cookie consent management. CookieScript CMP helps organizations manage the use of cookies and similar tracking technologies on their websites or apps. The CMP provides the possibility to get consent for just strictly necessary or also for non-essential cookies and gives options to opt-out of Cookie Consent. Cookie Consent management is a necessary part of complying with most major privacy laws.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is data privacy management?

Data privacy management comprises the rules, policies, and technical solutions used by organizations to assess their data processing activities and ensure personal data collection and management in compliance with privacy laws. Automated privacy management system is the only feasible solution to implement uniform data privacy policies. Use CookieScript CMP for your data privacy management.

What could be legal basis for data management?

One of these reasons could make legal basis for data management: user, consent, performance of a contract, legal obligations for the local authorities, vital interests of an individual or the interest of another natural person, public interests, or legitimate interests. Use CookieScript CMP for your data management.

How to perform data privacy management?

The safest way to implement data privacy management and comply with data privacy laws is to use a Consent Management Platform (CMP) CookieScript CMP is a reliable tool for data privacy management with the following functionalities: it allows consent collection and management, data sharing management, consent storage management, and Cookie Consent management.