Privacy impact assessment (PIA) guideline for securing personal data

Abstract

Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a tool to assess the potential effects or impacts onto a privacy of a project, initiative, system, or even scheme which involve on the handling of indivisuals’ personal data. This tool is used to mitigate or avoid the identified risks through a series of activities. However, PIA is not being widelyimplemented and in fact, PIA can be considered new in United Kingdom (UK) after Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and Ireland started. Besides UK, the other countries have started to reach their PIA maturity and because of that, their established PIA guidelines being studied by the experts and researchers to understand on the PIA processes being implemented by those countries. This project is meant to propose a PIA guideline to be implemented in any small-scale electronic systems that involved in handling personal information which in return will be very helpful in assessing the potential risks that might compromised the privacy of those personal data. In order to design the proposed PIA guideline, it is crucial to conduct a thorough study on this field by analysing the existing PIA guidelines, researches of this area, and also other relevant resources. The biggest challenge in this project lies in selecting the best activities and number of PIA steps to be included in the proposed guideline due to the absence of an international PIA standard and also the difference needs and requirements of organisations. In conjunction to that, a comparison and mapping activities will be conducted which in the end will result to the selection of the appropriate activities and number of steps for the proposed guideline. The proposed guideline will then need to be validated by the experts of this field to obtain a feedback which will help to further enhance the proposed guideline. Finally, the final draft of the guideline will be designed by analysing the given feedbacks by the experts of this area