With different privacy regulations in every country, business owners have their hands full when it comes to legal compliance. Let’s look at a couple challenges you can expect.

Turning Privacy Policies into Enforceable Decisions

To comply with data privacy laws, businesses must turn their privacy policies into rules that their applications can use. This includes policies regarding when data expires and should no longer be used. This process requires businesses to establish clear policies, procedures, and training, as well as implement system updates to ensure that policies are enforced within systems.

Of course, the privacy policy itself requires an initial strategy. Some laws give companies the flexibility to interpret privacy laws and define their approach. And you need to have a plan that can be enforced consistently across the organization. For example, you might determine that a customer who registers for a webinar grants permission that remains valid for 12 months. Meanwhile, making a purchase might grant permission for 24 months. You then have to enforce these decisions in each system you use. Then your employees have to be trained on all of this. It’s a long process, but a crucial one. A well-written privacy policy shows creates a framework for enforcement and comply with privacy laws to the best of your ability, and protects you in the event of a customer claim.

Another part of privacy policy development is risk tolerance—how strictly you interpret the more flexible privacy requirements. Let’s look at how this applies to the GDPR-specific concept of legitimate interest. Your company can interpret legitimate interest very strictly and only reach out to customers who have given explicit consent to be contacted or who have actually purchased from you. Your legal department may favor this route. However, a looser interpretation of that same law would allow you to contact potential customers who may not have given explicit consent, but have expressed interest in other ways (like signing up for a webinar). Your marketing department will likely prefer this.

Strict interpretations are technically safer. On the other hand, broader interpretations allow for more extensive marketing efforts, but with the potential risk of retaining customer data too long. Your company’s privacy policy needs to find a sustainable balance between the two extremes and then consistently apply the policy.

Empowering Legal to Defend Through Detailed Activity History

Activity tracking provides an audit trail of how personal data is collected, processed, and used, which is important in the event of a data breach or a legal dispute. In addition, activity tracking helps businesses identify areas where they can improve their data privacy practices and reduce their risk of non-compliance.

For instance, let’s say a customer complains about receiving marketing emails from you. They might claim they never gave consent to be contacted. With a detailed activity record, your legal team can quickly respond with information about when and how the customer’s data was collected, along with your company’s policy for data handling. This can provide clarity to both parties.

This is an excerpt from our white paper “Combining the Law & Technology for Data Privacy”. Download and read the full white paper for free here.