Responsible organizations understand that privacy governance is essential for the systematic and compliant management of personal data and for maintaining customer and stakeholder trust. In a world where people increasingly have to fight for their right to privacy and where data breaches seem almost inevitable, it becomes even more necessary for organizations to establish a solid privacy governance framework.
But what is privacy governance, and how do businesses build a privacy governance framework that's both comprehensive and sustainable?
In this post, we're going to cover the basics of governance and hand our readers the essential building blocks to creating a robust data governance framework.
But first...
What Is Privacy Governance?
Privacy governance is a structured set of guidelines, principles, policies, and processes that a business establishes to ensure that personal data (both customer and employee) is properly handled and protected. It is usually closely aligned with privacy laws and compliance regulations, like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
In addition to reducing the risk of incurring penalties for non-compliance, governance is also a matter of ethics. Organizations shouldn't protect their people's private data because they have to, but because everyone has the right to privacy.
The core features of governance include:
- A policy framework
- Legal and regulatory compliance with appropriate laws
- Measures to protect and secure personal data
- An appointed person who is responsible for accountability and oversight; e.g., a data protection officer (DPO) or privacy program manager
- Risk management measures
- Data subject rights management
- Training and awareness
- Incident management and response; e.g., response protocols and disaster recovery
- Monitoring and auditing
- Transparency and communication; i.e., clear language around privacy policies
The Importance of Data Privacy in Governance
Data privacy is a focal point of governance practices. Without strong privacy measures, your organization's data governance efforts could lack clarity and protections for consumers’ rights, leaving you open to potential compliance risks.
Key Components of Data Privacy Governance Frameworks
Much like a building needs blueprints, governance needs a framework in order for organizations to fully understand what their policies actually are and the roles and responsibilities around those policies.
Policy Definition, Development, and Implementation
In order to enforce organization-wide governance, your team first needs to define your privacy policies. This step can be an involved process unto itself, but it is essential. We cover the information that should be included in your privacy policy in the Ultimate Privacy Policy Checklist. The mere act of building out a privacy policy and ensuring it accurately describes your data processing activities will go a long way to building the foundation for robust data privacy governance.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
Be sure to define the roles and responsibilities of your core team in your governance framework.
The more everyone understands their roles in data privacy, the more effective your governance will be. While respecting consumers’ rights is everyone's responsibility, the following key stakeholders will have significant roles to play when it comes to enforcing data privacy:
- The C-Suite
- DPO, if mandated by the law (such as GDPR), or another person designated to be responsible for compliance (as required under the CCPA)
- Legal teams
- IT
- Data governance teams, i.e., data managers, data stewards, etc.
- HR
- Marketing and sales
Data Inventory and Management
How can you effectively manage your data if you don't know what you have or where it's stored? This aspect of your data governance framework concerns itself with identifying, categorizing, monitoring, and managing information that your organization collects.
Good governance practices dictate that your organization should know the following about the data you collect from your users:
- What it is
- Why you collect it
- Where you store it
- Where and how you transfer it
- Who can access it
In some jurisdictions, such as in the EU, this is a necessary requirement of your privacy policy and is called a Record of Processing Activities, or RoPA.
Privacy Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Risk assessments play a crucial role in data protection. Assessments look at data-handling processes in various contexts to discover any potential vulnerabilities within your organization.
Conducting risk assessments will help your organization identify opportunities to improve your practices beyond what is required of your team from a privacy regulation perspective.
Generally speaking, there are five different types of privacy assessments, and your organization will have to determine which one is most appropriate. Those are:
- Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) and/or Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs)
- Vendor Risk Assessments (VRAs)
- Enterprise Risk Assessments (ERAs)
- Transfer Impact Assessments (TIAs)
- Business Impact Assessments (BIAs)
These privacy assessments are designed to help your compliance team proactively mitigate risks, enhance data security, and build trust with customers and stakeholders.
Compliance Monitoring and Reporting
Data flows like a rushing current, which makes compliance not just more important but more complex. Effective governance must include a method for systematically monitoring the organization's regulatory compliance and reporting on issues.
The easiest way to keep an eagle eye on organizational compliance is through software that supports advanced privacy reporting. For example, Osano's reporting features enhance privacy program visibility and help spotlight urgent compliance issues. The Osano platform helps teams manage consent, data subject rights, data mapping, assessments, and vendor risk all under one roof and provides reporting capabilities for each of these.
Common Privacy Governance Models
Data governance is a huge but important undertaking, so if you're looking to build your privacy framework on a pre-existing model, consider adopting one of these frameworks:
Common Challenges in Data Privacy Governance
Let's take a look at some of the common governance challenges that a framework can often help solve.
Lack of Cooperation Within Your Organization
Everyone within an organization needs to be on board with regulatory compliance and the responsible handling of personal data—from employees to data privacy managers to data managers to the C-suite. While it's up to management to enforce compliance, employees need to feel like their actions make a difference.
Educating employees about the importance of privacy compliance is one thing, but enforcing it on a daily basis is another. Strong leadership is needed to foster a culture of data governance and to field employee concerns, confusion, and resistance.
Data Visibility and Control Issues
Data silos negatively affect governance. They get in the way of streamlined data management by impeding visibility, accessibility, integration, and collaboration—not to mention how they affect your regulatory compliance.
Not knowing where all your data lives, how accurate it is, or even who is in charge of managing it can undermine your governance and policies.
Data discovery and data mapping can help your organization easily understand where you store personal information and what data you actually have.
Evolving Regulatory Requirements
Like rights and languages, data privacy law is in a constant state of change. Protecting personal data can often feel like a moving target, especially as data privacy best practices and compliance regulations become more refined in the wake of AI's influence.
While it's necessary for policies and procedures to change, keeping up with these changes without raising privacy concerns or risking vulnerabilities can be quite challenging, even when you have a DPO or another privacy professional taking charge of privacy.
The best way to stay ahead of evolving regulatory requirements is to learn more about the laws that apply to your organization, create a framework in which everyone's roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, and manage your privacy programs on a single platform.
Best Practices for Strengthening Privacy Governance
We've looked at the challenges of creating robust frameworks, so let's take a look at best practices.
Establish Clear Policies and Procedures
Clarity is key. Without a doubt, the strongest defense against employee resistance and data compliance fatigue is to build clear, concise, and consistent policies and procedures that align with GDPR, CPRA, DPDPA, and any other applicable law.
Managing and monitoring everything from one place, such as a compliance platform, also ensures that there's a single source of truth.
Regularly Assess Data Risks
If compliance is a moving target, then so is risk. Effective data governance involves regularly assessing your privacy practices—everything from consent to vendor risk management—to ensure adherence not only to your data governance policies but also to compliance with data regulations.
Your findings should be used to refine governance strategies.
Leverage Technology for Data Management and Compliance
Take advantage of technology like data cataloging tools to track and classify data across systems, as well as compliance-monitoring tools to automate audits and reporting. Leveraging this kind of technology helps teams implement privacy-by-design practices, so that compliance is built into business operations rather than bolted on to current procedures.
