As the internet continues to play a large part in the day to day life, more personal data is shared online. This has driven trends such as big data and business analytics as enterprise service providers move in to exploit this data for competitive advantage. But the adoption of sharing services such as social media and image hosting services blurs the line between privacy and the spread of information. Debate in this area continues with several people calling for the redefinition of privacy, there is however the issue of well-funded organization conducting surveillance on internet users and this forces a re-thinking of data privacy. The International Association of Privacy Professionals has teamed up with AvePoint to offer enterprises a free impact assessment tool to automate the process of evaluating and assessing privacy implications in the business IT systems.
AvePoint Privacy Impact Assessment (APIA) provides the following:
- Comply with Privacy Regulations: APIA helps organizations analyze how personal information is handled and comply with privacy impact assessments (PIA) required by global privacy legislation.
- Automate Privacy Impact Assessments: APIA’s form based survey system provides built-in workflows as well as configurable questions and answers to simplify the process for privacy, security, IT, and business owners of enterprise systems to interact and communicate to conduct comprehensive PIAs.
- Report on PIAs for Stakeholder Review: APIA automatically generates PIA reports in accordance with organization specific privacy risk analysis for easier distribution to Chief Privacy Officers for review.
- Extend to Security and Vulnerability Assessments: APIA is fully extensible and customizable for security and vulnerability assessments as well as requirements from other quality assurance and/or records management review.
The IAPP and AvePoint are also hosting a community portal where questions and best practices on privacy impact assessments can be shared.
“Privacy impact assessments (PIAs) are an important tool being used frequently by organizations to ensure that they are in compliance with global privacy laws and regulations,” said J. Trevor Hughes, CIPP, President & CEO of the IAPP. “We’re excited to collaborate with AvePoint to provide the global privacy community with a technology solution that mitigates the risk inherent with manual PIAs and positions privacy professionals to work more efficiently.”
