Data protection-related risks from a new project that could impact your organisation or the people it interacts with can be identified and mitigated through data protection impact assessments.
What is DPIA?
The people whose data your organisation is processing run risks when it gathers, stores, or uses that data. These dangers include people being concerned that your organisation will use their data for unspecified purposes or that their personal information may be stolen or accidentally exposed and utilised by criminals to pretend to be them.
Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is a term used to describe a procedure for identifying and minimising risks associated with personal processing data. DPIAs are crucial instruments for reducing risk and proving GDPR compliance.
A project might be thought of as either a specific function of your organisation or a plan to improve how your organisation operates. If you want to know whether your organisation needs a DPIA, click here.
How Would You Know If You Need to Conduct a DPIA?
Where data processing is likely to result in great danger to the rights and freedoms of natural people, a DPIA is required by the General Data Protection Regulation. Of course, when a new data processing technology is introduced, this is very important.
Conducting a DPIA is nevertheless good practice and a helpful tool to assist data controllers in complying with data protection law when it is unclear whether a DPIA is strictly required.
Who Should Conduct a DPIA?
The DPIA must be carried out, and that is the data controller’s responsibility. The data controller is ultimately responsible, even if that responsibility has been delegated to another person inside or outside the organisation.
As part of the DPIA process, this advice and the decisions made should be documented. In addition, if a data processor is engaged in the processing, they should support the DPIA and give any required information.
A designated individual chosen by an organisation to guide data protection policies inside the organisation is known as a Data Protection Officer (DPO). A staff person or an outside service provider may serve as the DPO.
People had the skills and familiarity with the project in question, and typically, the project team should be in charge of the DPIA.
However, you might think about hiring outside experts to consult on or conduct the DPIA if your organisation doesn’t have enough knowledge and experience on staff, if a specific project is expected to involve a high level of risk, or if it will probably have an extremely wide-ranging impact on many people.
The DPIA can gain from an extensive internal consultation process because some threats to data protection may be obscure to people working on particular project components.
Additionally, it will provide you with the chance to get input from people whose jobs will be affected by the project once it is implemented, like engineers, designers, and developers, who will have experience with the processes. Finally, the public relations team at your company can help you effectively inform outside stakeholders of the DPIA’s findings.
Steps to Carry out a DPIA
The GDPR specifies the following requirements for a DPIA in its recitals 84 and 90 and article 35(7):
- an explanation of the proposed processing activities and the intended uses of the processing.
- an evaluation of the processing need and proportionality
- as an evaluation of the dangers to data subjects’ rights and liberties.
The GDPR provides a broad, general framework for creating and executing a DPIA. This enables flexibility and scalability so that even the smallest data controllers may develop and implement a DPIA. This also enables the data controller to choose the exact structure and form of the DPIA for usage with current working practices.
Advantages of a DPIA
Your organisation’s awareness of the risks to data protection associated with a project will increase because of doing a DPIA. This will strengthen your project’s design and your ability to communicate with key stakeholders about data privacy threats. The following are a few advantages of performing a DPIA:
- Ensuring and proving that your company complies with the GDPR to stay out of trouble.
- Enhancing communications about data protection problems to boost public confidence.
- Ensuring that your users’ rights to privacy are not infringed upon.
- Enabling your organisation’s new projects to embrace data protection by design.
- Lowering operating expenses by streamlining project-wide information flows and removing pointless data collecting and processing.
- Lowering the risks to your organisation from data protection.
- Reducing the expense and disruption of data protection measures via early incorporation into project design.
Conclusion
Data protection by design refers to integrating data privacy elements and privacy-enhancing technologies into project design. This will make it possible to protect personal data privacy more effectively and affordably.
