Privacy has taken on an unprecedented level of importance in 2022, primarily online privacy. There are multiple reasons behind this increase. The primary one is that users online are now more educated, informed and concerned than ever before about the collection of their personal data and, perhaps more importantly, how the website collecting this data manages and uses it.

Privacy management refers to the practices, tools and strategies that an organization develops behind the scenes to ensure that any and all data collected is managed in a way that is  fully compliant with data regulations.

Like every other division within an organization, the dev and DevOps teams play a vital role in successfully implementing and executing privacy management solutions. But how can the dev and DevOps teams contribute in this regard? Where should they begin? What practices to adopt?

Be Clear About Your Privacy Policy

This has less to do with the organization’s practices and more to do with the overall philosophy about privacy. There’s no point in beating around the bush regarding data collection and users’ privacy since the better educated and informed your users, the higher their chances of giving you the appropriate data collection permissions.

You should be straightforward and let your users know why you need to collect their data. While this topic will undoubtedly be covered in the website’s privacy policy, it should also be reflected in the user’s browsing experience while on the site.

This can be done by ensuring there’s an easy-to-find and quickly accessible link to the site’s privacy policy across all web pages on the website.

Collect Only the Most Essential Data

This may seem like a given in 2022, considering how unyielding and austere most data protection regulations are. However, there are still organizations that are in the middle of transforming their data collection practices. That means that even though the legislation they must comply with requires minimal data collection, in actuality, their practices paint another picture.

This is not necessarily a deliberate or malicious practice. Most legislation, even those that are quite clear in stating that only the most essential data required for a website to function properly may be collected, gives organizations leeway regarding when they must adhere to these laws. The CPRA is perhaps the most vivid example of this.

While the CPRA was passed in 2020, it will not go into effect until January 2023. Most organizations are expected to ensure their data collection practices are in line with the law when it goes into effect. There’s no point in delaying the inevitable. If your organization hasn’t begun transforming and altering its data collection practices, it is high time to start.

Have a Data Transfer Mechanism and Strategy in Place

This is arguably the most sensitive part of any organization’s privacy management infrastructure. This is down to the fact that while an organization may have to comply with a data protection regulation in one country to process and collect data on its residents, it may find itself having to balance out its practices to be able to transfer this data to another jurisdiction.

Moreover, nearly every data protection regulation has a stringent set of requirements that an organization must fulfill before it can transfer the data out of the jurisdiction in the first place.

Naturally, this can all become incredibly messy and escalate into a crisis unless you have a proper data transfer mechanism and strategy in place that takes into account every possible step that may hinder your compliance efforts.

Ultimately, the buck stops with the dev team and DevOps team, in this case, to ensure that whatever mechanism the organization ends up adopting is fully capable of transferring data securely across jurisdictions without leading to a breach of any regulatory statutes an organization is required to follow.

Ensure Accountability

Some would argue that the entire philosophy of privacy management is built upon accountability. While various data protection regulations globally are meant to ensure all businesses follow a certain set of practices that reduce any chances of data breaches, true accountability comes from within.

The most practical method of ensuring such accountability is by maintaining a regular and up-to-date record of processing activities (RoPA). Again, this is something that most data protection regulations will require businesses to maintain anyway, with processing activities, data flows and categories of data subjects the most common items that need to be covered.

Similarly, make sure any third parties or vendors you work with have the relevant practices in place before going forward with any sort of data sharing, even if you have user consent to do so.

Remember, accountability means holding yourself and those you work with to the highest standards.

The most effective way to do this is to automate the process of record keeping. Owing to both the sheer volume of data that may become involved and the risks associated with human error in record keeping at scale, the best way forward is to opt for a data-centric automated approach.

Conduct Regular Assessments

Depending on which laws your organization must adhere to, regular assessments, known as privacy impact assessments (PIA), could be legally required. Most organizations design and implement their own PIA depending on their current practices and data collection methodologies.

However, there are some fundamentals that each PIA is supposed to follow, such as the following:

• The what, why, when and how of all data being collected
• Will the data be shared or sold to any third parties?
• What measures are in place to ensure the data is stored correctly once collected?

The purpose of any PIA is to help you evaluate just how at-risk your organization is based on its current data collection practices. These evaluations can help you identify gaps and flaws in your current practices while also highlighting areas for improvement.

On the off chance that you do discover discrepancies, the best option going forward is to contact the organization’s internal data protection officer (DPO) and develop a roadmap for eliminating those discrepancies before they cause any real damage.