Introduction
In today’s world, preserving personal data has become crucial. Protecting personal information is a best practice and a legal requirement. Ensuring that it’s handled properly is paramount for companies and businesses that manage personal data, as the repercussions of mishandling it can be dire. It is also important for these companies to put measures in place to protect personal data at the ideation stage of a product. This is where Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) come in handy.
In this blog post, we’ll journey through the essentials of a DPIA—a crucial process for protecting data and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Nigeria Data Protection Act.
What is a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)?
A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is a structured procedure to assess and mitigate the possible risks arising from data processing activities. It is not merely a compliance requirement but rather a valuable technique that helps safeguard the privacy rights of individuals and allows organizations to make well-informed decisions regarding data processing. By conducting a DPIA, organizations can identify and address any potential privacy concerns before they become problematic.
Why a DPIA Matters?
Our modern world heavily relies on data; therefore, personal information is constantly being collected, stored, and processed by various organizations for different reasons ranging from improving their products and services to conducting targeted marketing. While this is important for innovation and growth, it also presents potential risks to the privacy and rights of individuals.
Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) are crucial because they provide a structured method to identify, assess, and mitigate these risks. DPIAs help organizations balance benefiting from data processing and protecting the personal information they handle. In essence, DPIAs act as a shield to protect against potential data protection pitfalls.
When should an organization conduct a DPIA?
The DPIA is an innovative element in the GDPR and many other laws, including the NDPR and NDPA, relevant to the accountability principle and privacy by design. Whenever controllers plan to perform processing activities that may lead to a high risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, they must carry out a data protection impact assessment. This condition becomes even more critical in cases involving the utilization of new or innovative technologies for which no prior data protection impact assessment has been completed.
While performing a DPIA is not obligatory for every processing operation, but only when the processing is expected to lead to a “high risk” to the “rights and freedoms of individuals”, The Working Party (WP) 29 developed a list of criteria for assessing the high risk involved in certain types of processing, including, among others:
- The existence of assessment or scoring operations;
- The presence of automated decision-making;
- Systematic monitoring;
- The use of special categories of data;
- The existence of large-scale data processing;
- Personal data relating to vulnerable individuals;
- The use of new technologies;
- The fact that the processing may inhibit the data subject from either exercising their rights or using a particular service.
Organizations are required to perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) before processing personal data. This aligns with the principles of data protection by design and by default. A DPIA is a useful tool that helps organizations make informed decisions regarding processing personal data. By performing a DPIA early, organizations can proactively identify and address any potential risks or privacy concerns associated with the processing activities.
Elements of a DPIA
The GDPR sets out a list of key elements which a standard DPIA must contain.
- Organizations must assess any new product and benchmark it against the criteria for assessing “high risk to data subjects” to ascertain whether a DPIA will be required. This should occur as early as practicable in the project lifecycle.
- Defining the characteristics of the project to enable an assessment of the risks to take place. When conducting an assessment, it is important to provide detailed information about the processing operations and their purposes in a systematic manner. This first step involves describing the flow of data and clearly indicating the legal basis for processing, including any legitimate interests pursued by the controller. This will ensure that the process is transparent and follows the appropriate guidelines.
- The controller needs to ensure that the process is transparent and follows the appropriate guidelines. During the assessment, it is necessary to consider and explain the necessity and proportionality of each processing activity with respect to the purpose pursued. The controller should provide an explanation for why a particular processing activity or a set of processing activities is essential to achieve a specific goal.
- It is essential to identify potential data protection risks that may arise from the project design. This step involves scrutinizing the project design to assess any data protection issues and identifying possible risks that the project may expose individuals to. Additionally, it is essential to identify data protection-related risks that the project might create for your organization.
- After identifying data protection risks, the next step is to find solutions that minimize the risks associated with data privacy. Although it may not always be possible to eliminate data protection risks, the goal in this stage is to strike a balance between the risks and the outcomes of the project. Data protection solutions are measures that can be taken to lessen the likelihood or severity of data privacy risks. The aim is to ensure that any risks accepted are proportional to the objectives of the project.
- Integrating data protection solutions into a project is a crucial step after its approval. Once the DPIA findings are documented in a report, it is essential to implement any necessary changes into the project plans. The sooner DPIA is completed, the easier it will be to enforce privacy by design solutions.
DPIA and Privacy by Design
Privacy by design refers to building technology and policies that aim to embed privacy into the earliest phase of the development lifecycle. DPIAs by their very nature epitomize the concept of “privacy by design,” where privacy considerations are woven into the fabric of every data processing activity. By conducting DPIAs early and proactively, organizations infuse privacy into their systems, services, and products, promoting ethical data handling from the outset.
Conclusion
Today, in the digital age where data is freely available and privacy concerns are of utmost importance, data protection has become an essential tool for protecting individual rights and ensuring privacy. The journey we’ve taken through this blog post has highlighted the profound importance of Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) and how to carry them out.
