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When people say "data is the new oil," they're usually referring to its value. But in reality, oil requires careful handling, management, storage, protection, and processing before it can be turned into a truly valuable resource. The same can be said of data.

Consumer data, especially sensitive personal data, is protected by laws and needs to be treated with respect and handled responsibly. Not only does this help you avoid fines for non-compliance, it earns consumer trust, improves data governance, and strengthens your brand.

All things being equal, anyone would want to handle their consumers’ personal and sensitive data respectfully and responsibly—even without the threat of financial penalties. But responsible data handling approached from the wrong angle can be time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, data privacy automation can make it easy to respect your consumers’ privacy rights and win all the benefits that respect entails.

What Does Data Privacy Automation Mean?

Data privacy automation is when you use digital tools and technology to carry out data privacy tasks and processes, freeing up your employees to focus on activities that cannot be undertaken by software. It can help you save a considerable amount of time. 

In the case of a business collecting personal information from your consumers, data privacy can be quite complicated. The various processes involved in data privacy management can be listed as follows:

  • Data mapping
  • Cookie consent management
  • Unified consent and preference management
  • Subject rights management
  • Assessments
  • Vendor and third-party risk management

You’re looking at thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of consumers. Any data you collect from them has to be managed and its privacy maintained. At the same time, you must consider and honor their preferences.

If, at any time, they want access to their personal data, you should be able to provide it to them within a reasonable period of time (generally, 30 or 45 days depending on the governing regulation). You also need to evaluate your processes from time to time and change them as your data collection and processing requirements change.

Finally, if you share any personal information of your consumers with vendors and third parties, you also need to make sure they follow privacy regulations and don’t compromise data privacy.

That’s a lot of processes, especially if you do them all manually. It becomes even more complicated when you realize your data collection and processing needs change over time. You might need additional categories of personal data because your business changed or expanded its services. 

Alternatively, if you invest in new technologies, it might mean you don’t need as much personal information from consumers, or you might need different kinds of personal information. As your business processes change, so do your data collection and storage requirements.

You’re handling a large number of moving parts, and you have to deal with them without compromising the integrity of your consumers’ personal data. Done manually, this can be pretty time-consuming—not to mention prone to error. 

Automating data privacy compliance makes your privacy management easier.

Why Do You Need Data Privacy Automation?

If data privacy can be managed manually, do you even need automation? What benefits does it offer? 

Accuracy

When you’re managing your consumers’ data with privacy in mind, you have to follow several processes. Some of these may require copying information from the form or email the user sent into a database or spreadsheet. 

For example, let’s say you were handling consent requests through static forms. That would mean someone would have to take the preferences the user has listed and implement them across all your platforms manually. This is usually not a problem if you’re doing it once or twice a day. 

However, if you’re an enterprise with hundreds and thousands of these coming in, the sheer tedium and repetitiveness of the task will mean a human will eventually lose focus and make a mistake. 

When you use a software solution to automate tthe process of managing privacy, you don’t have to worry about human error or bias, which might creep into decisions when rules are applied with subjective interpretations.

Speed

Computing tools are known for their speed of processing. Ask a chatbot to give you a 500-word essay on the subject of your choice, and it will generate it in seconds. Ask a human to do the same, and they will take anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours, depending on their knowledge of the topic.

If a human wants to ensure accuracy, they must sacrifice speed, but a person, even if they are careless, cannot work as quickly as a computer. Automation tools speed up your privacy management tasks without sacrificing accuracy.

They also enable real-time response to user requests, which can help your reputation in the market.

Easier Compliance

Part of the requirements of data privacy regulations like the GDPR is accountability. You must have records of user consent, audits, privacy protection and data security measures. It is possible to keep these records in a paper-based format, but creating and producing them when required is time-consuming.

Automation streamlines the audit process dramatically. All your information is stored digitally in a centralized point. You can even save the results of previous audits and retrieve them with a few clicks.

If the automated system detects a compliance risk or potential breach, it can alert you before the issue becomes a bigger problem. Automation can also ensure that your privacy practices are aligned with regulations without much manual intervention.

Heightened Data Security

When you automate privacy, you also enhance your data security. Privacy automation tools also map your data and prioritize systems with higher data risk. This helps you focus your security efforts on the datasets that need it most. Part of mapping data is understanding how it flows and the relationship between systems. Understanding this can enable you to identify any weak points in the data lifecycle.

These tools also flag irrelevant or deprecated data stores so they aren’t scanned, which helps to reduce your attack surface.

One of the principles of data privacy is data minimization. Storing only relevant data can be useful in reducing your storage costs and the potential impact of a breach. By automating data discovery and classification and flagging deprecated stores, automation tools inform you of any excess data you might have in your stores.

What Should Privacy Program Automation Cover?

Automated Data Mapping

Data mapping is the process of identifying and inventorying the information you have and where it’s stored. Consumer data comes in many forms and types. It’s exactly like bits of information you’ve gathered from your friends. And, because it’s so varied, it’s stored in different places and formats.

It’s very difficult to implement data privacy solutions if you don’t know where your data lives, what’s being done to it, and where it’s going. Data mapping can help you identify your data stores; privacy risks; and outstanding compliance tasks like assessments, deletions, or needed security controls.

When you automate the data mapping process, it becomes faster and more accurate. For example, you can connect Osano to your single sign-on (SSO) provider to find connected systems where your consumers’ personal information is stored and processed without having to manually identify each and every system in your organization. 

Even if you have some data stores that aren’t connected to your SSO, Osano’s semi-automated assessment workflows make it less tedious to discover and onboard data stores into your data map. Our data privacy automation platform helps you streamline the process of manual data discovery and verification.

Our solution also automatically identifies each system’s privacy risk, flagging high-risk systems so you can apply security and privacy controls or come back to reevaluate them when needed.

Cookie Consent Management

If your website uses first- or third-party cookies to collect information and track the usage of your customers, you need a cookie consent banner. Most data privacy regulations insist that you inform viewers that you’re using cookies so they can give informed consent to be tracked.

Depending on the jurisdiction, you might have to gain their explicit opt-in before you can collect any data, or you might just have to give them the ability to opt out and withdraw consent.

If you do it manually, someone must implement cookie banners, integrate opt-in and opt-out functionality with your tag manager, configure the categories, and track user preferences. You’ll also need to ensure your website can accept universal opt-out signals, like the Global Privacy Control.

Automating cookie consent management with a tool like Osano requires just a line of JavaScript on your website header, and you can implement customized cookie banners. Osano automatically recommends cookie categories, which you can review and approve or adjust. It also stores a record of consumer preferences and enables consumers to adjust their preferences in compliance with privacy regulations. 

In short, Osano can help you lay the foundation for compliance in over 50 countries in a matter of minutes.

Universal Consent and Preference Management

Where cookie consent only deals with website cookies and whether users are happy to have those trackers dropped on their browser, universal consent and preference management focuses on consent across various non-cookie-based tracking activities and communication channels.

If you were to gather consent and preferences manually, you’d need to either develop your own in-house universal consent and preference management solution or collect consumer preferences through individual forms across individual channels. Then, you’d need to manually adjust the various systems you use to collect data and send out communications or maintain an integration with those systems. That might look like reviewing an individual’s email communication preferences submitted via a form and then moving that individual to a list in your email client populated with other individuals who’ve signalled the same preference. 

Or, you might have to dive into your content management system (CMS) to flag that you shouldn’t collect data from a certain IP address. For one or two consumers, honoring their requests in compliance with regulation wouldn’t be a problem; for hundreds or thousands, it’d be overwhelming.

With automated consent and preference management, however, you can dynamically collect, process, and immediately implement user preferences. Most importantly, you can do so across platforms, so your consumers can enjoy a unified experience, no matter where they interact with your business.

Using a privacy program automation solution will also make it easier for your users to manage their privacy preferences and make it easier for you to comply with their wishes.

Data Protection and Privacy Impact Assessments

PIAs and DPIAs play an important role in managing and ensuring privacy. They make you take a closer look at your processes so you can find flaws that could affect consumer data privacy.

It’s important to note that while PIAs don’t have a strict format, they are required under most US state privacy laws. Generally, organizations follow standards set by NIST or ISO when carrying out PIAs. DPIAs have a more prescriptive format and are a requirement under the GDPR. Since it can be difficult to identify the right format on your own, Osano provides templates for both DPIAs and standards-based PIAs.

The challenge in manual privacy assessments isn’t necessarily that they take a long time to do. Individual assessments aren’t too time-consuming, but they do add up en masse. The main challenges with manual privacy assessments are that they are bottlenecks to carrying out a project or task and often require collaboration from stakeholders across the business. While you wait for a team lead in another department to provide crucial information, your colleagues are waiting to get started on their initiative. 

However, automating the workflow can mitigate these challenges. You can use pre-built assessment templates based on security standards and customize them to your needs. Stakeholders assigned to different assessments receive notifications when they’re falling behind, and you can automatically send out new batches for periodic assessments.

The Osano privacy management platform will also tell you which assessments have been completed and if there are any outstanding. Plus, all your results are stored in one place and can be retrieved easily for compliance audits.

Subject Rights Management

When you have the records of hundreds or thousands of consumers, finding the information of one customer can be time-consuming. While you do get a “reasonable” amount of time to fulfill a DSAR, processing such a request manually can be very tedious. 

Automating subject rights management can save you time and make the process much more efficient. For example, Osano automatically identifies relevant data subject records and processes common request types, like summaries and deletions, pending human verification. 

Vendor and Third-Party Risk Management

If you rely on vendors for certain services or share data with third parties, you want them to be just as committed to consumer data privacy as you are. 

If you think they’re high-risk, you’ll need to monitor them more closely. You also want to know if they have had any privacy policy changes or any lawsuits against them that could affect your consumers’ privacy. 

Discovering and tracking this information manually would require a dedicated team constantly following all your vendors and third-party service providers. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to do with an automated vendor risk management platform.

Osano’s platform includes a database of tens of thousands of vendors and generates a privacy risk score for each, enabling you to build a shortlist of trustworthy vendors before you start onboarding. Osano also automatically tracks lawsuits, data breaches, and privacy policy changes for vendors you select, alerting you to vendors who may have put you at risk.

Automating Data Privacy With Osano

You’ve seen the benefits of data privacy automation. Why not let Osano handle it for you? Our “No Fines. No Penalties” pledge promises that as long as you configure our products according to our documentation, we’ll pay any penalties (up to $200,000) you receive. Let us handle your privacy management processes so you can focus on strengthening your business.

Schedule a demo of Osano today

The Big Data Privacy Bundle

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