Question 1
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Manasa is a product manager at Omnipresent Omnimedia, where she is responsible for leading the development of the company's flagship product, the Handy Helper. The Handy Helper is an application that can be used in the home to manage family calendars, do online shopping, and schedule doctor appointments.
After having had a successful launch in the United States, the Handy Helper is about to be made available for purchase worldwide.
The packaging and user guide for the Handy Helper indicate that it is a "privacy friendly" product suitable for the whole family, including children, but does not provide any further detail or privacy notice. In order to use the application, a family creates a single account, and the primary user has access to all information about the other users. Upon start up, the primary user must check a box consenting to receive marketing emails from Omnipresent Omnimedia and selected marketing partners in order to be able to use the application.
Sanjay, the head of privacy at Omnipresent Omnimedia, was working on an agreement with a European distributor of Handy Helper when he fielded many Questions about the product from the distributor. Sanjay needed to look more closely at the product in order to be able to answer the Questions as he was not involved in the product development process.
In speaking with the product team, he learned that the Handy Helper collected and stored all of a user's sensitive medical information for the medical appointment scheduler. In fact, all of the user's information is stored by Handy Helper for the additional purpose of creating additional products and to analyze usage of the product. This data is all stored in the cloud and is encrypted both during transmission and at rest.
Consistent with the CEO's philosophy that great new product ideas can come from anyone, all Omnipresent Omnimedia employees have access to user data under a program called Eureka. Omnipresent Omnimedia is hoping that at some point in the future, the data will reveal insights that could be used to create a fully automated application that runs on artificial intelligence, but as of yet, Eureka is not well-defined and is considered a long-term goal.
What administrative safeguards should be implemented to protect the collected data while in use by Manasa and her product management team?
Question 2
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Martin Briseno is the director of human resources at the Canyon City location of the U.S. hotel chain Pacific Suites. In 1998, Briseno decided to change the hotel's on-the-job mentoring model to a standardized training program for employees who were progressing from line positions into supervisory positions. He developed a curriculum comprising a series of lessons, scenarios, and assessments, which was delivered in-person to small groups. Interest in the training increased, leading Briseno to work with corporate HR specialists and software engineers to offer the program in an online format. The online program saved the cost of a trainer and allowed participants to work through the material at their own pace.
Upon hearing about the success of Briseno's program, Pacific Suites corporate Vice President Maryanne Silva-Hayes expanded the training and offered it company-wide. Employees who completed the program received certification as a Pacific Suites Hospitality Supervisor. By 2001, the program had grown to provide industry-wide training. Personnel at hotels across the country could sign up and pay to take the course online.
As the program became increasingly profitable, Pacific Suites developed an offshoot business, Pacific Hospitality Training (PHT). The sole focus of PHT was developing and marketing a variety of online courses and course progressions providing a number of professional certifications in the hospitality industry.
By setting up a user account with PHT, course participants could access an information library, sign up for courses, and take end-of-course certification tests. When a user opened a new account, all information was saved by default, including the user's name, date of birth, contact information, credit card information, employer, and job title. The registration page offered an opt-out choice that users could click to not have their credit card numbers saved. Once a user name and password were established, users could return to check their course status, review and reprint their certifications, and sign up and pay for new courses. Between 2002 and
2008, PHT issued more than 700,000 professional certifications.
PHT's profits declined in 2009 and 2010, the victim of industry downsizing and increased competition from e- learning providers. By 2011, Pacific Suites was out of the online certification business and PHT was dissolved.
The training program's systems and records remained in Pacific Suites' digital archives, un-accessed and unused. Briseno and Silva-Hayes moved on to work for other companies, and there was no plan for handling the archived data after the program ended. After PHT was dissolved, Pacific Suites executives turned their attention to crucial day-to-day operations. They planned to deal with the PHT materials once resources allowed.
In 2012, the Pacific Suites computer network was hacked. Malware installed on the online reservation system exposed the credit card information of hundreds of hotel guests. While targeting the financial data on the reservation site, hackers also discovered the archived training course data and registration accounts of Pacific Hospitality Training's customers. The result of the hack was the exfiltration of the credit card numbers of recent hotel guests and the exfiltration of the PHT database with all its contents.
A Pacific Suites systems analyst discovered the information security breach in a routine scan of activity reports. Pacific Suites quickly notified credit card companies and recent hotel guests of the breach, attempting to prevent serious harm. Technical security engineers faced a challenge in dealing with the PHT data.
PHT course administrators and the IT engineers did not have a system for tracking, cataloguing, and storing information. Pacific Suites has procedures in place for data access and storage, but those procedures were not implemented when PHT was formed. When the PHT database was acquired by Pacific Suites, it had no owner or oversight. By the time technical security engineers determined what private information was compromised, at least 8,000 credit card holders were potential victims of fraudulent activity.
How would a strong data life cycle management policy have helped prevent the breach?
Question 3
An organization's privacy officer was just notified by the benefits manager that she accidentally sent out the retirement enrollment report of all employees to a wrong vendor.
Which of the following actions should the privacy officer take first?
Question 4
What is one obligation that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes on data processors?
Question 5
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Your organization, the Chicago (U.S.)-based Society for Urban Greenspace, has used the same vendor to operate all aspects of an online store for several years. As a small nonprofit, the Society cannot afford the higher-priced options, but you have been relatively satisfied with this budget vendor, Shopping Cart Saver (SCS). Yes, there have been some issues. Twice, people who purchased items from the store have had their credit card information used fraudulently subsequent to transactions on your site, but in neither case did the investigation reveal with certainty that the Society's store had been hacked. The thefts could have been employee-related.
Just as disconcerting was an incident where the organization discovered that SCS had sold information it had collected from customers to third parties. However, as Jason Roland, your SCS account representative, points out, it took only a phone call from you to clarify expectations and the "misunderstanding" has not occurred again.
As an information-technology program manager with the Society, the role of the privacy professional is only one of many you play. In all matters, however, you must consider the financial bottom line. While these problems with privacy protection have been significant, the additional revenues of sales of items such as shirts and coffee cups from the store have been significant. The Society's operating budget is slim, and all sources of revenue are essential.
Now a new challenge has arisen. Jason called to say that starting in two weeks, the customer data from the store would now be stored on a data cloud. "The good news," he says, "is that we have found a low-cost provider in Finland, where the data would also be held. So, while there may be a small charge to pass through to you, it won't be exorbitant, especially considering the advantages of a cloud." Lately, you have been hearing about cloud computing and you know it's fast becoming the new paradigm for various applications. However, you have heard mixed reviews about the potential impacts on privacy protection. You begin to research and discover that a number of the leading cloud service providers have signed a letter of intent to work together on shared conventions and technologies for privacy protection. You make a note to find out if Jason's Finnish provider is signing on.
What process can best answer your Question about the vendor's data security safeguards?