Privacy Management & Data Protection Topics
Privacy compliance, data protection frameworks, privacy incident investigation, and regulatory requirements. Covers privacy impact assessments, data classification, regulatory interpretation, and privacy-first operational practices.
Compliance Monitoring and Auditing
Processes for ongoing compliance monitoring including regular audits, compliance checklists aligned with regulations, evidence collection to demonstrate compliance (documentation, training records, consent records), gap identification, and remediation planning. Understanding how to assess whether the organization is actually following its policies and regulations. Knowing what compliance evidence to maintain and for how long.
Data Classification and Impact Assessment
Frameworks and practices for categorizing data by sensitivity and regulatory or business requirements, and for assessing the impact when data is exposed. Candidates should be able to explain classification tiers such as public, internal, sensitive, and restricted, describe methods for discovering and mapping sensitive data across systems, and estimate business and compliance impact of different types of data loss. Expect to discuss controls that reduce impact including encryption, access controls, retention policies, and logging, as well as how to prioritize notification and remediation based on potential exposure and business criticality. Also cover coordination with privacy, legal, and business owners during incident response and post incident reporting.
Data Breach Notification and Communication
Knowledge and practical skills for managing communications and regulatory notifications during and after data breaches or security incidents. This includes determining breach scope and impact, preserving evidence and factual accuracy, and coordinating cross functional response among security, legal, privacy, public relations, executive leadership, and incident response teams. Candidates should understand statutory notification triggers and timelines and jurisdictional differences, including familiarity with timelines such as the seventy two hour authority notification window in the General Data Protection Regulation and requirements under the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Skills include drafting clear audience specific messages and templates for regulators, affected individuals, customers, partners, employees, and the public that explain what happened in plain language, what data may have been exposed, the risk to individuals, mitigation steps, recommended user actions, and available support such as credit monitoring. Also covered are channel selection for individual and mass notification including email, postal letter, media notices, consumer reporting agencies and public notice options when contact information is unavailable; crafting language that is informative without creating unnecessary legal exposure; escalation protocols; recordkeeping, audit trails, and board reporting; cross border notification and data transfer considerations; post incident updates, lessons learned communications, and strategies for managing media inquiries and preserving customer trust.