Who’s looking at my data? Practical data privacy (part 2)

The forthcoming GDPR legislation requires an organisation to be able to monitor and audit data usage.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes law across the EU in May 2018. GDPR builds on existing data protection principles extending both the scope and depth of existing rules and imposing strict legal responsibilities on organisations using any form of personal data.

The broad scope of GDPR regulations means that their impact will extend across your whole organisation, far beyond marketing data analysis. This technical note is limited to helping you meet GDPR requirements within marketing data, accessed and analysed through a FastStats system.

Specifically, it does not address related areas like general IT security, data gathering, consents and online tracking.

Here are some useful background links:

http://www.dataiq.co.uk/blog/summary-eu-general-data-protection-regulation

https://ico.org.uk/media/1624219/preparing-for-the-gdpr-12-steps.pdf

https://www.twobirds.com/en/hot-topics/general-data-protection-regulation

Data Use Monitor and Audit

The GDPR makes data protection officers responsible for monitoring and auditing use of personal data. Apteco provide the tools to record and analyse exactly which users have accessed which variables for each data analysis job.

Every time an analysis job is run, the details are logged in the job queue table. The ‘Variable Scanner’ utility can be pointed at a live or archived job queue to extract all the pertinent information into a ready templated FastStats system. Once built using FastStats Designer, the system can be used to slice, dice and drill through the logged data analysis jobs.

You can immediately see the types of jobs that have been run across users and variables. Templated cubes, datagrids and charts can be employed to report on data usage. Potential misuse of data can be explored by drilling through to the job information.

Data usage statistics can also be used to decide whether infrequently used variables can be removed or archived from a system.  This is a useful tool when looking to minimise variables for data privacy reasons but also to reduce time processing virtual variables after a build.

The ‘Variable Scanner’ is provided in the standard enterprise installation in the ‘Utilities’ folder.

Learn more about the latest industry trends that are shaping data and its usage this year. Download: The Omni-Channel Data Trend Report 2017.