The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) introduces one of the most comprehensive privacy laws ever existed in the United States that transcends even the borders of California. The CRPA applies to businesses – regardless of their location. These businesses collect, store, process, sell or share the personal information or sensitive personal information of a California resident.
As your organization makes the jump from California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to the CPRA, it is imperative that you revisit your privacy framework. This along with revisiting pertinent business practices ensures compliance. While you are at it, you may also want to check out the following necessary tools that can help you speed up the process, reduce errors, fortify security posture, automate data mapping, and streamline data subject request (DSR) fulfillment.
Top 4 CRPA Compliance Tools That Your Organization Must Consider
You can use a number of tools or a combination of a set of tools for this purpose. However, there are some highlighted tools that are instrumental in ensuring efficient compliance with the CPRA. Let’s take a look at those tools and learn why your organization needs them.
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Sensitive Data Classification
While the CPRA retains most of the provisions from the CCPA, such as the definition of personal information (PI), it introduces a new subset of PI that it labels as “sensitive personal information (SPI).” SEC. 14. Section 1798.140 of the CPRA defines SPI as any personal information that reveals a consumer’s financial account, driver’s license, social security number, password, credit card number, precise geolocation, racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, genetic data, and biometric information, to name a few.
To comply with the CPRA, organizations must treat SPI differently than personal information, and thus, ensure added layers of protection. For this reason, a sensitive data classification tool can greatly assist your organization with identifying SPI. A sensitive data classification tool can scan throughout your complex data environments to identify and classify all the personal information and sensitive personal information, its lineage, and flow. With a combination of pre-defined metadata templates along with the in-house knowledge of your team, the tool can catalog the entire data and inventory it in one single place.
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Data Mapping Automation
Data minimization restricts organizations from collecting excessive personal information. And restricting it to only information that is directly and reasonably necessary to achieve a specific purpose. Storage limitation, or data retention, requires organizations to retain or store personal information. This is for only as long as it accomplishes the purpose for which it was collected. Data minimization has been a part of the GDPR but wasn’t mandated in the CCPA. However, now they require it in the CPRA under Section 1798.100. The same section also discussed storage limitation provisions.
With a robust data mapping automation tool, your organization can efficiently map all the personal information accordingly. This is with the CPRA data minimization and storage limitation provisions. The tool will sift through the information, labeling the metadata with the purpose limitation and data retention period, enabling the organization to automate data purging or deletion when the information serves the purpose or when it is no longer needed.
Data mapping automation that can effectively handle purpose limitation and storage retention is not just an investment for CPRA compliance but also for consumers’ trust, seeing half of the Americans prefer not to use products or services due to privacy concerns.
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Personal Information Linking Automation
CCPA introduced us to five data subjects’ rights. However, the CPRA not only revises those rights but also adds four more to the list. The data subject rights under the CPRA range from rights to access and modification to the right to opt-out of selling and limited use or disclosure of sensitive personal information. However, the fulfillment or rejection of those rights comes with a 45-days window. Plus, if failed, an organization must suffer penalties due to non-compliance.
DSR fulfillment is easier said than done. Because of the massive data sprawl and the resulting unstructured data that organizations usually have. According to a survey, 56% of organizations cite “unstructured data” as the most difficult issue when it comes to responding to DSRs. Here, a PI linking automation tool can greatly assist.
A PI linking automation tool can sift through your arsenal of data assets to identify the personal information and link it to its respective owner. Apart from simply linking the data, it also gives you detailed insights into residency, data lineage, and its location, to name a few. With these insights at your disposal, you can not only speed up DSR fulfillment but also ensure timely breach notification.
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Universal Consent Management Tool
Consent is among those legal bases that organizations leverage to collect or process personal information. In the CPRA, consent must be “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indications.” Furthermore, certain actions wouldn’t be qualified as consent if they include any dark patterns, hovering, muting, or pausing a given piece of content, general actions taken by consumers, etc. Moreover, different devices or touch points exist from which you acquire consent. However, tracking all those touchpoints and maintaining a perfect record of all those consents can be a bane.
A universal consent management tool can enable organizations to gather consent. Then it dynamically synchronizes all the consent records in a seamless manner. Organizations can seamlessly collect consent from a myriad of touchpoints, including websites, SaaS applications, or other mobile applications. Furthermore, organizations can maintain an extensive track record of all the consents for auditing purposes.
Conclusion
This blog highlights the most important tools that can enable organizations to effectively comply with the California Privacy Rights Act. However, there are a great number of equally important tools that can help organizations automate other components of the CPRA. These include privacy notice automation, vendor assessment, data governance, and security posture management. You don’t need to sign up for a different set of tools to meet different components of the CPRA. You can achieve it with one solution.
