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An organization's privacy officer was just notified by the benefits manager that she accidentally sent out the retirement enrollment report of all employees to a wrong vendor.
Which of the following actions should the privacy officer take first?
A marketing team regularly exports spreadsheets to use for analysis including customer name, birthdate and home address. These spreadsheets are routinely shared between members of various teams via email even with employees that do not need such granular data.
What is the best way to lower overall risk?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
You lead the privacy office for a company that handles information from individuals living in several countries throughout Europe and the Americas. You begin that morning’s privacy review when a contracts officer sends you a message asking for a phone call. The message lacks clarity and detail, but you presume that data was lost.
When you contact the contracts officer, he tells you that he received a letter in the mail from a vendor stating that the vendor improperly shared information about your customers. He called the vendor and confirmed that your company recently surveyed exactly 2000 individuals about their most recent healthcare experience and sent those surveys to the vendor to transcribe it into a database, but the vendor forgot to encrypt the database as promised in the contract. As a result, the vendor has lost control of the data.
The vendor is extremely apologetic and offers to take responsibility for sending out the notifications. They tell you they set aside 2000 stamped postcards because that should reduce the time it takes to get the notice in the mail. One side is limited to their logo, but the other side is blank and they will accept whatever you want to write. You put their offer on hold and begin to develop the text around the space constraints. You are content to let the vendor’s logo be associated with the notification.
The notification explains that your company recently hired a vendor to store information about their most recent experience at St. Sebastian Hospital’s Clinic for Infectious Diseases. The vendor did not encrypt the information and no longer has control of it. All 2000 affected individuals are invited to sign-up for email notifications about their information. They simply need to go to your company’s website and watch a quick advertisement, then provide their name, email address, and month and year of birth.
You email the incident-response council for their buy-in before 9 a.m. If anything goes wrong in this situation, you want to diffuse the blame across your colleagues. Over the next eight hours, everyone emails their comments back and forth. The consultant who leads the incident-response team notes that it is his first day with the company, but he has been in other industries for 45 years and will do his best. One of the three lawyers on the council causes the conversation to veer off course, but it eventually gets back on track. At the end of the day, they vote to proceed with the notification you wrote and use the vendor’s postcards.
Shortly after the vendor mails the postcards, you learn the data was on a server that was stolen, and make the decision to have your company offer credit monitoring services. A quick internet search finds a credit monitoring company with a convincing name: Credit Under Lock and Key (CRUDLOK). Your sales rep has never handled a contract for 2000 people, but develops a proposal in about a day which says CRUDLOK will:
Send an enrollment invitation to everyone the day after the contract is signed.
Enroll someone with just their first name and the last-4 of their national identifier.
Monitor each enrollee’s credit for two years from the date of enrollment.
Send a monthly email with their credit rating and offers for credit-related services at market rates.
Charge your company 20% of the cost of any credit restoration.
You execute the contract and the enrollment invitations are emailed to the 2000 individuals. Three days later you sit down and document all that went well and all that could have gone better. You put it in a file to reference the next time an incident occurs.
What is the most concerning limitation of the incident-response council?
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SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Natalia, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the Nationwide Grill restaurant chain, had never seen her fellow executives so anxious. Last week, a data processing firm used by the company reported that its system may have been hacked, and customer data such as names, addresses, and birthdays may have been compromised. Although the attempt was proven unsuccessful, the scare has prompted several Nationwide Grill executives to question the company's privacy program at today's meeting.
Alice, a Vice President (VP), said that the incident could have opened the door to lawsuits, potentially damaging Nationwide Grill's market position. The Chief Information Officer (CIO), Brendan, tried to assure her that even if there had been an actual breach, the chances of a successful suit against the company were slim. But Alice remained unconvinced.
Spencer – a former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and currently a senior advisor – said that he had always warned against the use of contractors for data processing. At the very least, he argued, they should be held contractually liable for telling customers about any security incidents. In his view, Nationwide Grill should not be forced to soil the company name for a problem it did not cause.
One of the Business Development (BD) executives, Haley, then spoke, imploring everyone to see reason. "Breaches can happen, despite organizations' best efforts," she remarked. "Reasonable preparedness is key." She reminded everyone of the incident seven years ago when the large grocery chain Tinkerton's had its financial information compromised after a large order of Nationwide Grill frozen dinners. As a long-time BD executive with a solid understanding of Tinkerton's's corporate culture, built up through many years of cultivating relationships, Haley was able to successfully manage the company's incident response.
Spencer replied that acting with reason means allowing security to be handled by the security functions within the company – not BD staff. In a similar way, he said, Human Resources (HR) needs to do a better job training employees to prevent incidents. He pointed out that Nationwide Grill employees are overwhelmed with posters, emails, and memos from both HR and the ethics department related to the company's privacy program. Both the volume and the duplication of information means that it is often ignored altogether.
Spencer said, "The company needs to dedicate itself to its privacy program and set regular in-person trainings for all staff once a month."
Alice responded that the suggestion, while well-meaning, is not practical. With many locations, local HR departments need to have flexibility with their training schedules. Silently, Natalia agreed.
How could the objection to Spencer's training suggestion be addressed?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Amira is thrilled about the sudden expansion of NatGen. As the joint Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with her long-time business partner Sadie, Amira has watched the company grow into a major competitor in the green energy market. The current line of products includes wind turbines, solar energy panels, and equipment for geothermal systems. A talented team of developers means that NatGen's line of products will only continue to grow.
With the expansion, Amira and Sadie have received advice from new senior staff members brought on to help manage the company's growth. One recent suggestion has been to combine the legal and security functions of the company to ensure observance of privacy laws and the company's own privacy policy. This sounds overly complicated to Amira, who wants departments to be able to use, collect, store, and dispose of customer data in ways that will best suit their needs. She does not want administrative oversight and complex structuring to get in the way of people doing innovative work.
Sadie has a similar outlook. The new Chief Information Officer (CIO) has proposed what Sadie believes is an unnecessarily long timetable for designing a new privacy program. She has assured him that NatGen will use the best possible equipment for electronic storage of customer and employee data. She simply needs a list of equipment and an estimate of its cost. But the CIO insists that many issues are necessary to consider before the company gets to that stage.
Regardless, Sadie and Amira insist on giving employees space to do their jobs. Both CEOs want to entrust the monitoring of employee policy compliance to low-level managers. Amira and Sadie believe these managers can adjust the company privacy policy according to what works best for their particular departments. NatGen's CEOs know that flexible interpretations of the privacy policy in the name of promoting green energy would be highly unlikely to raise any concerns with their customer base, as long as the data is always used in course of normal business activities.
Perhaps what has been most perplexing to Sadie and Amira has been the CIO's recommendation to institute a privacy compliance hotline. Sadie and Amira have relented on this point, but they hope to compromise by allowing employees to take turns handling reports of privacy policy violations. The implementation will be easy because the employees need no special preparation. They will simply have to document any concerns they hear.
Sadie and Amira are aware that it will be challenging to stay true to their principles and guard against corporate culture strangling creativity and employee morale. They hope that all senior staff will see the benefit of trying a unique approach.
If Amira and Sadie's ideas about adherence to the company's privacy policy go unchecked, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could potentially take action against NatGen for what?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Richard McAdams recently graduated law school and decided to return to the small town of Lexington, Virginia to help run his aging grandfather's law practice. The elder McAdams desired a limited, lighter role in the practice, with the hope that his grandson would eventually take over when he fully retires. In addition to hiring Richard, Mr. McAdams employs two paralegals, an administrative assistant, and a part-time IT specialist who handles all of their basic networking needs. He plans to hire more employees once Richard gets settled and assesses the office's strategies for growth.
Immediately upon arrival, Richard was amazed at the amount of work that needed to done in order to modernize the office, mostly in regard to the handling of clients' personal data. His first goal is to digitize all the records kept in file cabinets, as many of the documents contain personally identifiable financial and medical data. Also, Richard has noticed the massive amount of copying by the administrative assistant throughout the day, a practice that not only adds daily to the number of files in the file cabinets, but may create security issues unless a formal policy is firmly in place Richard is also concerned with the overuse of the communal copier/printer located in plain view of clients who frequent the building. Yet another area of concern is the use of the same fax machine by all of the employees. Richard hopes to reduce its use dramatically in order to ensure that personal data receives the utmost security and protection, and eventually move toward a strict Internet faxing policy by the year's end.
Richard expressed his concerns to his grandfather, who agreed, that updating data storage, data security, and an overall approach to increasing the protection of personal data in all facets is necessary Mr. McAdams granted him the freedom and authority to do so. Now Richard is not only beginning a career as an attorney, but also functioning as the privacy officer of the small firm. Richard plans to meet with the IT employee the following day, to get insight into how the office computer system is currently set-up and managed.
Richard needs to closely monitor the vendor in charge of creating the firm's database mainly because of what?
How do privacy audits differ from privacy assessments?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Today is your first day at a fast growing international real estate firm headquartered in New York, with offices in Canada and Germany. You are the firm's first ever privacy officer.
While touring the office to meet your new colleagues and learn the layout of the office, you notice piles of printing jobs left on the printer in the copy room. You also note a recycle bin and garbage can near the printers. With a quick glance, you see a completed loan application form print out with applicant name, social security number and home address lying in the recycle bin. You make a note to follow up immediately.
You are then introduced to the head of IT who gives you a warm welcome and explains his star project this year - enterprise CRM (Customer Relationship Management) mobility. He is very proud that he is leading this innovation that allows firm-wide employees to access the existing CRM database remotely from anywhere on the Internet. The business value of this mobility initiative is significant. Since he doesn't have internal web development expertise, he outsourced the development work to a small IT firm in New York that has just successfully delivered another IT initiative for the company.
After the tour you start working on a plan based on your observations. One immediate action is to schedule a meeting with the head of IT to discuss the CRM mobility project.
All of the following should be mandatory in the contract for the outsourced vendor EXCEPT?
If a privacy professional wants to show that an organization's privacy program is working as intended, the professional should?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
As they company’s new chief executive officer, Thomas Goddard wants to be known as a leader in data protection. Goddard recently served as the chief financial officer of Hoopy.com, a pioneer in online video viewing with millions of users around the world. Unfortunately, Hoopy is infamous within privacy protection circles for its ethically questionable practices, including unauthorized sales of personal data to marketers. Hoopy also was the target of credit card data theft that made headlines around the world, as at least two million credit card numbers were thought to have been pilfered despite the company’s claims that “appropriate” data protection safeguards were in place. The scandal affected the company’s business as competitors were quick to market an increased level of protection while offering similar entertainment and media content. Within three weeks after the scandal broke, Hoopy founder and CEO Maxwell Martin, Goddard’s mentor, was forced to step down.
Goddard, however, seems to have landed on his feet, securing the CEO position at your company, Medialite, which is just emerging from its start-up phase. He sold the company’s board and investors on his vision of Medialite building its brand partly on the basis of industry-leading data protection standards and procedures. He may have been a key part of a lapsed or even rogue organization in matters of privacy but now he claims to be reformed and a true believer in privacy protection. In his first week on the job, he calls you into his office and explains that your primary work responsibility is to bring his vision for privacy to life. But you also detect some reservations. “We want Medialite to have absolutely the highest standards,” he says. “In fact, I want us to be able to say that we are the clear industry leader in privacy and data protection. However, I also need to be a responsible steward of the company’s finances. So, while I want the best solutions across the board, they also need to be cost effective.”
You are told to report back in a week’s time with your recommendations. Charged with this ambiguous mission, you depart the executive suite, already considering your next steps.
You give a presentation to your CEO about privacy program maturity. What does it mean to have a “managed” privacy program, according to the AICPA/CICA Privacy Maturity Model?
For an organization that has just experienced a data breach, what might be the least relevant metric for a company's privacy and governance team?
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When implementing a privacy program for your organization, it is important to first understand?
Which of the following best supports implementing controls to bring privacy policies into effect?
A minimum requirement for carrying out a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) would include?
When developing a privacy program and selecting a program sponsor or "champion" the most important consideration should be that they?
Integrating privacy requirements into functional areas across the organization happens at which stage of the privacy operational life cycle?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Liam is the newly appointed IT Compliance Manager at Mesa, a US-based outdoor clothing brand with a global E-commerce presence. During his second week, he is contacted by the company's IT Audit Manager, who informs him that the auditing team will be conducting a review of Mesa's privacy compliance risk in a month.
A bit nervous about the audit, Liam asks his boss what his predecessor had completed related to privacy compliance before leaving the company. Liam is told that a consent management tool had been added to the website and they commissioned a privacy risk evaluation from a small consulting firm last year that determined that their risk exposure was relatively low given their current control environment. After reading the consultant's report, Liam realized that the scope of the assessment was limited to breach notification laws in the US and the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Not wanting to let down his new team, Liam kept his concerns about the report to himself and figured he could try to put some additional controls into place before the audit. Having some privacy compliance experience in his last role, Liam thought he might start by having discussions with the E-commerce and marketing teams.
The E-commerce Director informed him that they were still using the cookie consent tool forcibly placed on the home screen by the CIO, but could not understand the point since their office was not located in California or Europe. The Marketing Director touted his department's success with purchasing email lists and taking a shotgun approach to direct marketing. Both Directors highlighted their tracking tools on the website to enhance customer experience while learning more about where else the customer had shopped. The more people Liam met with, the more it became apparent that privacy awareness and the general control environment at Mesa needed help.
With three weeks before the audit, Liam updated Mesa’s Privacy Notice himself, which was taken and revised from a competitor's website. He also wrote policies and procedures outlining the roles and responsibilities for privacy within Mesa and distributed the document to all departments he knew of with access to personal information.
During this time, Liam also filled the backlog of data subject requests for deletion that had been sent to him by the Customer Service Manager. Liam worked with application owners to remove these individual's information and order history from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the data warehouse, and the email server.
At the audit kick-off meeting, Liam explained to his boss and her team that there may still be some room for improvement, but he thought the risk had been mitigated to an appropriate level based on the work he had done thus far.
After the audit had been completed, the Audit Manager and Liam met to discuss her team's findings, and much to his dismay, Liam was told that none of the work he had completed prior to the audit followed best practices for governance and risk mitigation. In fact, his actions only opened the company up to additional risk and scrutiny. Based on these findings, Liam worked with external counsel and an established privacy consultant to develop a remediation plan.
As the Data Protection Officer (DPO) for the growing company, Vision 3468, what would be the most cost effective way to monitor changes in laws and regulations?
Under the GDPR, when the applicable lawful basis for the processing of personal data is a legal obligation with which the controller must comply, which right can the data subject exercise?
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Which of the following information is NOT required to be provided by the data controller when complying with GDPR "right to access" requirements?
You're managing the internal privacy mailbox and are notified that a sales team member recently sent emails to their clients that included an excel spreadsheet of their client data. They just realized that the spreadsheet only hid the data of other clients and was not deleted. How do you respond?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
You were recently hired by InStyle Data Corp. as a privacy manager to help InStyle Data Corp. became compliant with a new data protection law.
The law mandates that businesses have reasonable and appropriate security measures in place to protect personal data. Violations of that mandate are heavily fined and the legislators have stated that they will aggressively pursue companies that don't comply with the new law.
You are paired with a security manager and tasked with reviewing InStyle Data Corp.'s current state and advising the business how it can meet the “reasonable and appropriate security’ requirement. InStyle Data Corp has grown rapidly and has not kept a data inventory or completed a data mapping. InStyle Data Corp. has also developed security-related policies ad hoc and many have never been implemented. The various teams involved in the creation and testing of InStyle Data Corp.'s products experience significant turnover and do not have well defined roles. There's little documentation addressing what personal data is processed by which product and for what purpose.
Work needs to begin on this project immediately so that InStyle Data Corp. can become compliant by the time the law goes into effect. You and your partner discover that InStyle Data Corp. regularly sends files containing sensitive personal data back to its customers, through email, sometimes using InStyle Data Corp employees personal email accounts. You also learn that InStyle Data Corp.'s privacy and information security teams are not informed of new personal data flows, new products developed by InStyle Data Corp. that process personal data, or updates to existing InStyle Data Corp. products that may change what or how the personal data is processed until after the product or update has gone live.
Through a review of InStyle Data Corp’ test and development environment logs, you discover InStyle Data Corp. sometimes gives login credentials to any InStyle Data Corp. employee or contractor who requests them. The test environment only contains dummy data, but the development environment contains personal data, including Social Security Numbers, health information, and financial information. All credentialed InStyle Data Corp. employees and contractors have the ability to alter and delete personal data in both environments regardless of their role or what project they are working on.
You and your partner provide a gap assessment citing the issues you spotted, along with recommended remedial actions and a method to measure implementation. InStyle Data Corp. implements all of the recommended security controls. You review the processes, roles, controls, and measures taken to appropriately protect the personal data at every step. However, you realize there is no plan for monitoring and nothing in place addressing sanctions for violations of the updated policies and procedures. InStyle Data Corp. pushes back, stating they do not have the resources for such monitoring.
Having completed the gap assessment, you and your partner need to first undertake a thorough review of?
When conducting due diligence during an acquisition, what should a privacy professional avoid?
Under the European Data Protection Board, which Processing operation would require a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)?
SCENARIO -
Please use the following to answer the next question:
John is the new privacy officer at the prestigious international law firm – A&M LLP. A&M LLP is very proud of its reputation in the practice areas of Trusts & Estates and Merger & Acquisition in both U.S. and Europe. During lunch with a colleague from the Information Technology department, John heard that the Head of IT, Derrick, is about to outsource the firm's email continuity service to their existing email security vendor – MessageSafe. Being successful as an email hygiene vendor, MessageSafe is expanding its business by leasing cloud infrastructure from Cloud Inc. to host email continuity service for A&M LLP.
John is very concerned about this initiative. He recalled that MessageSafe was in the news six months ago due to a security breach. Immediately, John did a quick research of MessageSafe's previous breach and learned that the breach was caused by an unintentional mistake by an IT administrator. He scheduled a meeting with Derrick to address his concerns.
At the meeting, Derrick emphasized that email is the primary method for the firm's lawyers to communicate with clients, thus it is critical to have the email continuity service to avoid any possible email downtime. Derrick has been using the anti-spam service provided by MessageSafe for five years and is very happy with the quality of service provided by MessageSafe. In addition to the significant discount offered by MessageSafe, Derrick emphasized that he can also speed up the onboarding process since the firm already has a service contract in place with MessageSafe. The existing on-premises email continuity solution is about to reach its end of life very soon and he doesn't have the time or resource to look for another solution. Furthermore, the off-premises email continuity service will only be turned on when the email service at A&M LLP's primary and secondary data centers are both down, and the email messages stored at MessageSafe site for continuity service will be automatically deleted after 30 days.
Which of the following is the most effective control to enforce MessageSafe's implementation of appropriate technical countermeasures to protect the personal data received from A&M LLP?
All of the key phases of an audit have occurred in the scenario EXCEPT?