Data Privacy Pitfalls? Not With These 5 Steps to Compliance Success

Organizations are diving into deeper customer relationships and more personalized experiences, often with the help of generative AI. As they do, personal data and data privacy compliance becomes a critical part of that strategy. In fact, 94% of business leaders believe their organizations should be getting more value from its data — and it’s no secret that good AI needs good data. 

But in this fast-moving technical landscape, using personal data requires extra special handling. This is especially true when it comes to building and maintaining a trusted relationship with your customers, while remaining compliant with the growing number of regulations around the world.

Why data privacy compliance is non-negotiable

Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in the United States, Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) in India, and the Australian Privacy Act set global standards for data protection.

Organizations face growing pressure to protect individual privacy rights while navigating an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. At the same time, consumers are more aware and concerned about how their personal information is collected, used, and safeguarded. By strengthening privacy and compliance frameworks, businesses can build trust with consumers and reduce legal risks and potential fines.

So, how do you keep customer data secure and protected while staying compliant with global regulations? Here are five steps to help you strengthen data privacy and compliance in your organization.

1. Understand the data you have — and classify it

Categorizing data by sensitivity — such as personal information, financial data, or health records — is crucial for effective data management and protection. It’s vital to understand what a piece of data is, how it can be used, and the protections around it. In turn, that allows you to implement targeted security measures and access controls that align with regulations like the GDPR, CPRA, and the Australian Privacy Act.

Proper data classification also helps pinpoint where sensitive information resides within an organization. It sets you up to apply appropriate safeguards, such as encryption, pseudonymization, or anonymization.

This clear classification not only maintains compliance with data protection laws but also supports quick responses to data subject access requests, sticking to the principles of data minimization and purpose limitation, all while creating a trusted relationship with your customers. 

Salesforce provides a free data classification tool that simplifies the process of classifying every standard and custom field, helping you identify your most sensitive data and incorporate it into your security and privacy policies.

2. Audit and update your access controls

With your data classified, you can now assess who in your organization should have access to what data. Audit your access controls and determine whether access rights are appropriate. 

Check if any accidental or intentional over-permissioning occurred, and review and update access permissions based on employee roles, data sensitivity, and regulatory requirements. Doing so can mitigate risks associated with data breaches and non-compliance. 

By proving the process of access control management, you’re prepared for a number of global regulatory inspections or audits while ensuring only those who absolutely need access to sensitive data can see it. You can manage access controls effectively by using tools that allow you to set permissions at various levels, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access sensitive data.

Salesforce allows you to manage access at a user, objective, and field level using the permissions and access settings. This approach helps maintain security and compliance across your organization.

3. De-identify data in your testing environment

One way companies experience data breaches is by using real data in their testing environments. Everyone wants realistic data to test their application. But by anonymizing or pseudonymizing sensitive information, organizations can simulate real-world scenarios without compromising individuals’ privacy rights or experiencing a data breach. 

This practice ensures that any data classified as personally identifiable information (PII) in the first step (such as names, addresses, and social security numbers), is not exposed during software testing, reducing the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access. 

De-identification is key to data minimization because it ensures you use only the necessary data for testing. This limits the risk of data exposure and keeps you in line with privacy laws. By using solid de-identification techniques and following ethical data practices, you can protect sensitive information and build stronger trust with your customers.

Solutions that protect sensitive data in secure testing environments, like Data Mask, are available to assist in de-identifying data. These tools can help you create policies to mask or replace sensitive information with non-identifiable data — using methods like random characters, similarly mapped words, pattern-based masking, or even deleted data. Pairing these tools with data classification (mentioned in the first step) ensures all your sensitive data is included.

Additionally, consider solutions that provide complete visibility into your testing environments and manage security. With tools like Security Center, you can centrally monitor, view, and manage your security health across multiple environments from a single platform, making it easier to maintain a strong compliance and security posture with actionable insights.

Step 4. Set up monitoring and alerts on sensitive data 

With your data classified, access controls in place, and apps tested for privacy compliance, it’s time to set up monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to keep everything secure.

Tracking and logging user activities lets you keep an eye on access patterns, spot anomalies, and respond quickly to potential security issues. Proactive and real-time alerts can help you catch and block unwanted activity and can stop data leaks before they happen. 

By logging all of the actions in your system, you can research issues, learn from past behavior, and improve monitoring management. Logging also sets you up to provide evidence of compliance during regulatory inspections or in response to data subject access requests.

Organizations can use toolsets to enhance compliance with data regulations and ensure data privacy. With tools like Event Monitoring, organizations can monitor security, track application performance, and glean product intelligence insights using event logs. 

It’s important to have solutions that proactively find security threats and respond effectively, respond to audits with ease by storing and querying event data using SOQL, and stay on top of compliance requirements.

Step 5. Provide customer controls for consent and preference management 

Lastly, one of the most critical aspects of a privacy and compliance program is respecting your customers’ wishes for their data use. Complying with data subject requests, practicing data minimization, and managing consent effectively are key to complying with global privacy laws.

Regulations like GDPR, CPRA, DPDPA, and the Australian Privacy Act emphasize individuals’ rights to access, delete, and revoke consent for their data. By quickly addressing these requests, organizations uphold privacy rights and avoid legal risks and fines associated with non-compliance. 

Implementing data minimization ensures you collect and retain only the essential data, reducing the impact of potential breaches. And effective consent management means getting clear and informed consent before processing personal data, fostering transparency and trust. These practices will strengthen data protection and organizational credibility, showcasing commitment to ethical data handling practices in accordance with evolving privacy laws.

At the final step, consider solutions to help manage consent and data requests, allowing you to handle data privacy efficiently and maintain compliance. For instance, Privacy Center is a suite of data management tools built to help you manage components of data privacy laws. It allows you to create, monitor, and track requests, automatically fulfilling data subject access and right-to-be-forgotten requests.

Customers can easily update their consent and preferences by hosting forms on your website or in Experience Cloud and updating their consent and preference data to your organization, next-Gen Marketing Cloud, or Data Cloud. And you can de-identify, delete, or move personal and sensitive data.

With the right tools and practices in place, including de-identification, deletion, or relocation of personal data, you’ll maintain a classified, permission-minimized, and secure data environment, ready to tackle data privacy compliance with confidence.