Data Privacy Management: Personal Data Under Lock and Key

We celebrated International Data Privacy Day not too long ago, on January 28. International Data Privacy Day aims to inform people about various data protection rules and regulations, their related rights, and not to tolerate activities that abuse or misuse their personal data.

In our previous blog post we discussed data anonymization – now it’s time to talk about data privacy management.

What is a data privacy register?

An important aspect of data privacy management is the data privacy register, in which a company, institution or organization records what personal data it collects, and how it stores and uses these data.

Why is having a data privacy register important?

The establishment of a data privacy register is a requirement of the Data Protection Regulation (commonly known as the GDPR) enacted by the European Union on 25 May 2018, which aims to increase the protection of people’s personal data and the enforcement of their rights.

What kind of organizations need to keep a data privacy register?

In general, any company or organization that processes personal data must have a data privacy register. For companies that manage little personal data, this can be done relatively easily, even in an Excel spreadsheet – although as the number of processed personal data increases, data registration becomes more and more difficult in such a rudimentary system.

Real challenges arise when an organization or company handles large amounts of personal data, even in multiple databases at the same time. These can typically be banks, insurance companies, telecommunications service providers or retailers – or even webshops with high turnover.

What functions should a well-functioning data privacy register perform?

The data privacy register records which personal data are collected, for what purpose and on what legal basis the collection is used. It is also necessary to know what security measures are in place to protect data and what rights people have in relation to the processing of their data. For example, data subjects (people whose personal data are stored and processed) have the right to know how their data is being used and the right to have their stored data deleted or amended.

The records contain the name and address of the operator, the name of the contact person and a detailed description of data processing activities. Processing activities should include the type of data collected, the purpose and the legal basis of data collection, the duration of storage of the data, as well as the rules for accessing the data.

An important part of establishing and maintaining a data privacy register is also risk assessment, the purpose of which is to identify potential data privacy risks and to identify the necessary security measures to protect the data.

All these requirements, at least for organizations that process large amounts of personal data, support the need for a single data privacy management system with several useful additional functions in addition to the basic functions.

The comprehensive data privacy management solution: GDPRoofed

Although there are several types of data privacy registers on the market, we would now like to highlight the advantages of GDPRoofed, our proprietary data privacy management solution, which

• has advanced functionality to achieve and maintain GDPR compliance;
• is user-friendly: it is ready for immediate use (does not require lengthy installation and training), it is easy to learn;
• it can manage, for example, the data protection records of multi-company structures (e.g. parent company and subsidiaries), and
• supports the work of users with reports and automations, including the continuous and automatic compliance with relevant legislation.

GDPRoofed thus provides an automated solution to comply with the provisions of the GDPR – ensuring not only one-off but also continuous compliance.

For more information, visit the GDPRoofed website. Contact us if you have any questions about data privacy management.