Data Privacy Management: Defined & Explained (Key Features)

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Consumer privacy awareness is increasing around the globe every year — 60% of people are concerned about their online privacy, and 79% of people expect to have control over how their data is used by a business, according to a 2022 DataGrail report. As a result, businesses are rightfully improving and expanding their data privacy management efforts.

What is Data Privacy Management?

Data privacy management is an umbrella term describing the organizational use of privacy frameworks and tools to protect people’s privacy rights, educate and inform them, give them control over their data, and adhere to applicable regulations.

Privacy management goes beyond keeping companies from breaking privacy laws. An effective, proactive privacy program builds trust with customers, employees, and other stakeholders by demonstrating the protection of their personal data — particularly sensitive data — and providing them with control.

Companies leveraging comprehensive privacy programs will find it easier to keep ahead of privacy regulations, build trust with transparency, outsmart risk, and use privacy as a business differentiator.

Understanding Data Privacy Laws and Regulations

Increasing privacy awareness means people are demanding more data security protections and better data privacy laws and data privacy regulations dedicated to protecting their rights. Some privacy laws don’t cover data security protection in-depth and may have separate data breach laws.

Data Privacy vs. Data Security: What’s the Difference?

While data privacy and data security overlap, there are some key differences between the two. Data privacy relates to giving consumers control over their data, while data security concerns a company’s duty to protect that same, sensitive data from threats.

The Generally Accepted Privacy Principles describe “Security for privacy” as “The entity protects personal information against unauthorized access (both physical and logical).”

A comprehensive data privacy management framework should help cover both privacy and security efforts following regulatory requirements. Privacy-focused steps like uncovering and dealing with shadow IT via data mapping can help support more comprehensive security programs.

The regulatory compliance landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace as states add legislation and privacy starts to come back into focus at the federal level. It’s vital for companies to stay on top of the various privacy laws they need to follow to avoid using illegal privacy practices which can lead to severe penalties and detrimental reputational damage.

Below are just a few data privacy regulations for companies to be aware of.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

A good example of a company learning the importance of data privacy management the hard way comes from the 2018 British Airways incident.

In 2018, British Airways suffered a data breach exposing the personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data of more than 400,000 customers. The breach was a result of a cyber attack exploiting vulnerabilities in the company’s data submission forms.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that British Airways lacked adequate security measures to protect customer data, violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a result, the ICO fined British Airways £20 million.

5 Key Concepts for Data Privacy Management

Organizations should understand these concepts to develop effective privacy management strategies and comply with regulatory requirements.

Automation With Data Privacy Management Software

The modern company’s tech stack seems to grow every day, which means massive amounts of data collection and storage across a company’s systems are occurring, sometimes without the organization’s knowledge.

It’s becoming nearly impossible to maintain high levels of brand trust, stay in regulatory compliance, and outsmart risk with a manual data privacy program. Organizations should look to powerfully automated software solutions and modules for comprehensive data privacy management.

The right software will leverage automation to assist companies with managing:

What are the benefits of automating your privacy management?

DataGrail’s integrated platform can help enhance an existing privacy program or build one from scratch to ensure regulatory compliance, reduce privacy risk, and support data management. We make it easy for our customers to achieve privacy peace of mind because they know our Responsible Automation is always working to outsmart their business risk and keep brand trust safe.

Key Features of Data Privacy Management Software

When organizations are looking to build a privacy program from the ground up or take their program to the next level, they must search for a data privacy management partner, not just a vendor. Today, SaaS solutions are easy to find, but it’s important to know exactly what you’re getting when you use one.

With DataGrail, you’re getting a privacy partner that’s completely vertically integrated. What does that mean? It means we built our products foundationally instead of by acquiring companies or new, external technologies. Because of this, all of our tools seamlessly integrate and provide you with the strongest, most comprehensive privacy control center on the market.

DataGrail customers enjoy:

The Bottom Line: Data Privacy Management Matters

Implementing privacy management software provides executives, privacy pros, CISOs, and cybersecurity employees with the necessary tools and features to streamline compliance management workflows, manage privacy risk, and maintain regulatory compliance, ultimately protecting their organization’s reputation, avoiding illegal privacy activity, and staying away from costly fines and penalties.

Frequently Asked Questions