DCPLA DSCI Certified Privacy Lead Assessor Questions and Answers

With respect to privacy governance, which of the following statements are correct? (Tick all that apply)

FILL BLANK

RCI and PCM

In April 2011, the rules were issued under Section 43A of the IT Act by the Government of India and the ‘body corporates’ were required to comply with these rules. The Corporate legal team tried to understand and interpret the rules but struggled to understand its applicability esp. to client relationships and business functions. So, the company hired an IT Act legal expert to advise them on the Section 43A rules.

To start with, the company identified the PI dealt with by business functions as part of the earlier visibility exercise, but it wanted to reassure itself. Therefore, a specific exercise was conducted to revisit ‘sensitive personal information’ dealt by business functions. It was realized that the company collects lot of SPI of its employees and therefore ‘reasonable security practices’ need to be adhered to by the functions that deal with SPI. It was also ascertained that many of this SPI is being dealt by third parties, some of which are also located outside India. To meet the requirements of the rules, the company reviewed all the contracts and inserted a clause – ‘the service provider shall implement reasonable security practices and procedures as per the IT (Amendment) Act, 2008’. Some of the large service providers were ISO 27001 certified and they claimed that they fulfill the requirements of ‘reasonable security practices’. However, some SME service providers did not understand what would ‘reasonable security practices’ imply and requested the company to clarify, which referred them to Rule 8 of the Section 43A. Some small scale service providers expressed their unwillingness to get ISO certified, given the costs involved.

(Note: Candidates are requested to make and state assumptions wherever appropriate to reach a definitive conclusion)

Introduction and Background

XYZ is a major India based IT and Business Process Management (BPM) service provider listed at BSE and NSE. It has more than 1.5 lakh employees operating in 100 offices across 30 countries. It serves more than 500 clients across industry verticals — BFSI, Retail, Government, Healthcare, Telecom among others in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The company provides IT services including application development and maintenance, IT Infrastructure management, consulting, among others. It also offers IT products mainly for its BFSI customers.

The company is witnessing phenomenal growth in the BPM services over last few years including Finance and Accounting including credit card processing, Payroll processing, Customer support, Legal Process Outsourcing, among others and has rolled out platform based services. Most of the company’s revenue comes from the US from the BFSI sector. In order to diversify its portfolio, the company is looking to expand its operations in Europe. India, too has attracted company’s attention given the phenomenal increase in domestic IT spend esp. by the government through various large scale IT projects. The company is also very aggressive in the cloud and mobility space, with a strong focus on delivery of cloud services. When it comes to expanding operations in Europe, company is facing difficulties in realizing the full potential of the market because of privacy related concerns of the clients arising from the stringent regulatory requirements based on EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

To get better access to this market, the company decided to invest in privacy, so that it is able to provide increased assurance to potential clients in the EU and this will also benefit its US operations because privacy concerns are also on rise in the US. It will also help company leverage outsourcing opportunities in the Healthcare sector in the US which would involve protection of sensitive medical records of the US citizens. The company believes that privacy will also be a key differentiator in the cloud business going forward. In short, privacy was taken up as a strategic initiative in the company in early 2011.

Since XYZ had an internal consulting arm, it assigned the responsibility of designing and implementing an enterprise wide privacy program to the consulting arm. The consulting arm had very good expertise in information security consulting but had limited expertise in the privacy domain. The project was to be driven by CIO ' s office, in close consultation with the Corporate Information Security and Legal functions.

Did the company take sufficient steps to protect SPI dealt by its service providers and ensure that it complies with the regulatory requirements? Was referring to ‘reasonable security practices’ sufficient in the contracts or the company should have also considered some other measures for privacy protection as well? (250 to 500 words)

Which of the following is not in line with the modern definition of Consent?

Arrange the following techniques in decreasing order of the risk of re-identification:

I) Pseudonymization

II) De-identification

III) Anonymization

__________ calls for inclusion of data protection from the onset of the designing of systems.

FILL BLANK

PPP

Based on the visibility exercise, the consultants created a single privacy policy applicable to all the client relationships and business functions. The policy detailed out what PI company deals with, how it is used, what security measures are deployed for protection, to whom it is shared, etc. Given the need to address all the client relationships and business functions, through a single policy, the privacy policy became very lengthy and complex. The privacy policy was published on company’s intranet and also circulated to heads of all the relationships and functions. W.r.t. some client relationships, there was also confusion whether the privacy policy should be notified to the end customers of the clients as the company was directly collecting PI as part of the delivery of BPM services. The heads found it difficult to understand the policy (as they could not directly relate to it) and what actions they need to perform. To assuage their concerns, a training workshop was conducted for 1 day. All the relationship and function heads attended the training.

However, the training could not be completed in the given time, as there were numerous questions from the audiences and it took lot of time to clarify.

(Note: Candidates are requested to make and state assumptions wherever appropriate to reach a definitive conclusion)

Introduction and Background

XYZ is a major India based IT and Business Process Management (BPM) service provider listed at BSE and NSE. It has more than 1.5 lakh employees operating in 100 offices across 30 countries. It serves more than 500 clients across industry verticals — BFSI, Retail, Government, Healthcare, Telecom among others in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The company provides IT services including application development and maintenance, IT Infrastructure management, consulting, among others. It also offers IT products mainly for its BFSI customers.

The company is witnessing phenomenal growth in the BPM services over last few years including Finance and Accounting including credit card processing, Payroll processing, Customer support, Legal Process Outsourcing, among others and has rolled out platform based services. Most of the company’s revenue comes from the US from the BFSI sector. In order to diversify its portfolio, the company is looking to expand its operations in Europe. India, too has attracted company’s attention given the phenomenal increase in domestic IT spend esp. by the government through various large scale IT projects. The company is also very aggressive in the cloud and mobility space, with a strong focus on delivery of cloud services. When it comes to expanding operations in Europe, company is facing difficulties in realizing the full potential of the market because of privacy related concerns of the clients arising from the stringent regulatory requirements based on EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

To get better access to this market, the company decided to invest in privacy, so that it is able to provide increased assurance to potential clients in the EU and this will also benefit its US operations because privacy concerns are also on rise in the US. It will also help company leverage outsourcing opportunities in the Healthcare sector in the US which would involve protection of sensitive medical records of the US citizens. The company believes that privacy will also be a key differentiator in the cloud business going forward. In short, privacy was taken up as a strategic initiative in the company in early 2011.

Since XYZ had an internal consulting arm, it assigned the responsibility of designing and implementing an enterprise wide privacy program to the consulting arm. The consulting arm had very good expertise in information security consulting but had limited expertise in the privacy domain. The project was to be driven by CIO ' s office, in close consultation with the Corporate Information Security and Legal functions.

Do you agree with company’s decision to have single privacy policy for all the relationships and functions? Please justify your view. (250 to 500 words)

Entities should collect personal information from user that is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed. This Privacy Principle is called:

‘Map the legal and compliance requirements to each data element that an organization is dealing with in all of its business processes, enterprise and operational functions, and client relationships.’ This an imperative of which DPF practice area?

Categorize the following statement:

“The network is unable to restrict unwanted external connections carrying sensitive information.”

The assessor organization can issue the DSCI certification to the assessee organization if it is satisfied with the assessment outcome.

Which of the following is not an objective of POR?

Following aspects can serve as inputs to a privacy organization for ensuring privacy protection:

I) Privacy related incidents detected/reported

II) Contractual obligations

III) Organization ' s exposure to personal information

IV) Regulatory requirements

Section 43A of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 holds____________ accountable for having reasonable security practices and procedures in place to protection sensitive personal data.

Which of the following wasn ' t prescribed as a privacy principle under the OECD Privacy Guidelines, 1980?

RCI and PCM

The Digital Personal Data protection Act 2023 has been passed recently. The Act shall be supported by subordinate Rules for various sections that will gradually bring more clarity into various aspects of the law. First set of Rules are yet to be formulated and notified. A public sector bank has identified that it collects and processes personal data in physical documents and electronic form. The bank intends to assess its existing compliance level and proactively undertake an exercise to ensure compliance. Since this is the first time the bank is attempting to comply with a comprehensive privacy law, it has hired a legal expert in Privacy law to assist with initial assessment and compliance activities. As part of the initial visibility exercise the consultant identified that the bank collects and generates a significant amount of personal data in physical and digital form. The data may be upto 200 million customers ' data. It is identified that customer onboarding is also done through various business correspondents in the field who collect and process personal data in physical and digital form on behalf of the bank for the purpose of opening bank accounts and this data is shared with the bank through various channels. There are upto 10 business correspondent companies that have been appointed by the bank across the country for such onboarding. These companies further appoint individual contractors on the field to face the customers. The legal consultant also identified that there are a huge number of employees and contractors engaged by the bank whose personal data is being collected and processed by the bank for HR purposes including biometric based attendance. While the intent of initial assessment was the new Act, the legal consultant has also identified that the Bank collects Aadhaar numbers (voluntary submission) from customers and employees and may be subject to Aadhaar Act compliance. It also came as a surprise that the bank wasn ' t aware of the data breach reporting mandate by one of the regulatory bodies under the Information Technology Act 2000 and that it was a criminal offense. The Bank generally outsources all non-core activities such as call centers which are handled by an Indian BPO company and document warehousing which is handled by another company. The Bank has also moved many of its applications to a known cloud provider as part of its digital strategy and there may be data transfer aspects associated with the same. On review of various contracts with third parties it was identified that the bank has signed standard terms of the cloud provider and has signed contracts with third parties which were in standard format of the third parties. Data protection obligations are not clear or available in these contracts. Bank leadership has been of the opinion that even the third parties should comply with the laws and robust contracts on legal compliance may not be needed. The legal consultant is not just expected to help identify gaps. assist in fixing the gaps but also to help implement controls and processes to continuously comply with evolving Rules under the new Act and also manage data protection with various third parties that may be appointed in the future.

(Note: Candidates are requested to make and state assumptions wherever appropriate to reach a definitive conclusion)

Introduction and Background

XYZ is a major India based IT and Business Process Management (BPM) service provider listed at BSE and NSE. It has more than 1.5 lakh employees operating in 100 offices across 30 countries. It serves more than 500 clients across industry verticals - BFSI, Retail, Government, Healthcare, Telecom among others in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The company provides IT services including application development and maintenance, IT Infrastructure management, consulting, among others. It also offers IT products mainly for its BFSI customers.

The company is witnessing phenomenal growth in the BPM services over last few years including Finance and Accounting including credit card processing, Payroll processing, Customer support, Legal Process Outsourcing, among others and has rolled out platform based services. Most of the company ' s revenue comes from the US from the BFSI sector. In order to diversify its portfolio, the company is looking to expand its operations in Europe. India, too has attracted company ' s attention given the phenomenal increase in domestic IT spend esp. by the government through various large scale IT projects. The company is also very aggressive in the cloud and mobility space, with a strong focus on delivery of cloud services. When it comes to expanding operations in Europe, company is facing difficulties in realizing the full potential of the market because of privacy related concerns of the clients arising from the stringent regulatory requirements based on EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

To get better access to this market, the company decided to invest in privacy, so that it is able to provide increased assurance to potential clients in the EU and this will also benefit its US operations because privacy concerns are also on rise in the US. It will also help company leverage outsourcing opportunities in the Healthcare sector in the US which would involve protection of sensitive medical records of the US citizens. The company believes that privacy will also be a key differentiator in the cloud business going forward. In short, privacy was taken up as a strategic initiative in the company in early 2011.

Since XYZ had an internal consulting arm, it assigned the responsibility of designing and implementing an enterprise wide privacy program to the consulting arm. The consulting arm had very good expertise in information security consulting but had limited expertise in the privacy domain. The project was to be driven by CIO ' s office, in close consultation with the Corporate Information Security and Legal functions.

Why the client or company failed to identify data breach earlier? (upto 250 words)

FILL BLANK

RCI and PCM

Given its global operations, the company is exposed to multiple regulations (privacy related) across the globe and needs to comply mostly through contracts for client relationships and directly for business functions. The corporate legal team is responsible for managing the contracts and understanding, interpreting and translating the legal requirements. There is no formal tracking of regulations done. The knowledge about regulations mainly comes through interaction with the client team. In most of the contracts, the clients have simply referred to the applicable legislations without going any further in terms of their applicability and impact on the company. Since business expansion is the priority, the contracts have been signed by the company without fully understanding their applicability and impact. Incidentally, when the privacy initiatives were being rolled out, a major data breach occurred at one of the healthcare clients located in the US. The US state data protection legislation required the client to notify the data breach. During investigations, it emerged that the data breach happened because of some vulnerability in the system owned by the client but managed by the company and the breach actually happened 5 months back and came to notice now. The system was used to maintain medical records of the patients. This vulnerability had been earlier identified by a third party vulnerability assessment of the system and the closure of vulnerability was assigned to the company. The company had made the requisite changes and informed the client. The client, however, was of the view that the changes were actually not made by the company and they therefore violated the terms of contract which stated that – “the company shall deploy appropriate organizational and technology measures for protection of personal information in compliance with the XX state data protection legislation.” The company could not produce necessary evidences to prove that the configuration changes were actually made by it (including when these were made).

(Note: Candidates are requested to make and state assumptions wherever appropriate to reach a definitive conclusion)

Introduction and Background

XYZ is a major India based IT and Business Process Management (BPM) service provider listed at BSE and NSE. It has more than 1.5 lakh employees operating in 100 offices across 30 countries. It serves more than 500 clients across industry verticals — BFSI, Retail, Government, Healthcare, Telecom among others in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The company provides IT services including application development and maintenance, IT Infrastructure management, consulting, among others. It also offers IT products mainly for its BFSI customers.

The company is witnessing phenomenal growth in the BPM services over last few years including Finance and Accounting including credit card processing, Payroll processing, Customer support, Legal Process Outsourcing, among others and has rolled out platform based services. Most of the company’s revenue comes from the US from the BFSI sector. In order to diversify its portfolio, the company is looking to expand its operations in Europe. India, too has attracted company’s attention given the phenomenal increase in domestic IT spend esp. by the government through various large scale IT projects. The company is also very aggressive in the cloud and mobility space, with a strong focus on delivery of cloud services. When it comes to expanding operations in Europe, company is facing difficulties in realizing the full potential of the market because of privacy related concerns of the clients arising from the stringent regulatory requirements based on EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

To get better access to this market, the company decided to invest in privacy, so that it is able to provide increased assurance to potential clients in the EU and this will also benefit its US operations because privacy concerns are also on rise in the US. It will also help company leverage outsourcing opportunities in the Healthcare sector in the US which would involve protection of sensitive medical records of the US citizens. The company believes that privacy will also be a key differentiator in the cloud business going forward. In short, privacy was taken up as a strategic initiative in the company in early 2011.

Since XYZ had an internal consulting arm, it assigned the responsibility of designing and implementing an enterprise wide privacy program to the consulting arm. The consulting arm had very good expertise in information security consulting but had limited expertise in the privacy domain. The project was to be driven by CIO ' s office, in close consultation with the Corporate Information Security and Legal functions.

What should be the learning for the company going forward? What should the consultants suggest? (250 to 500 words)

Which of the following mechanisms can be used to transfer personal data outside of a country?

FILL BLANK

IUA and PAT

The company has a very mature enterprise level access control policy to restrict access to information. There is a single sign-on platform available to access company resources such as email, intranet, servers, etc. However, the access policy in client relationships varies depending on the client requirements. In fact, in many cases clients provide access ids to the employees of the company and manage them. Some clients also put technical controls to limit access to information such data masking tool, encryption, and anonymizing data, among others. Some clients also record the data collection process to monitor if the employee of the company does not collect more data than is required. Taking cue from the best practices implemented by the clients, the company, through the consultants, thought of realigning its access control policy to include control on data collection and data usage by the business functions and associated third parties. As a first step, the consultants advised the company to start monitoring the PI collection, usage and access by business functions without their knowledge. The IT function was given the responsibility to do the monitoring, as majority of the information was handled electronically. The analysis showed that many times, more information than necessary was collected by the some functions, however, no instances of misuse could be identified.

After few days of this exercise, a complaint was registered by a female company employee in the HR function against a male employee in IT support function. The female employee accused the male employee of accessing her photographs stored on a shared drive and posting it on a social networking site.

(Note: Candidates are requested to make and state assumptions wherever appropriate to reach a definitive conclusion)

Introduction and Background

XYZ is a major India based IT and Business Process Management (BPM) service provider listed at BSE and NSE. It has more than 1.5 lakh employees operating in 100 offices across 30 countries. It serves more than 500 clients across industry verticals — BFSI, Retail, Government, Healthcare, Telecom among others in Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The company provides IT services including application development and maintenance, IT Infrastructure management, consulting, among others. It also offers IT products mainly for its BFSI customers.

The company is witnessing phenomenal growth in the BPM services over last few years including Finance and Accounting including credit card processing, Payroll processing, Customer support, Legal Process Outsourcing, among others and has rolled out platform based services. Most of the company’s revenue comes from the US from the BFSI sector. In order to diversify its portfolio, the company is looking to expand its operations in Europe. India, too has attracted company’s attention given the phenomenal increase in domestic IT spend esp. by the government through various large scale IT projects. The company is also very aggressive in the cloud and mobility space, with a strong focus on delivery of cloud services. When it comes to expanding operations in Europe, company is facing difficulties in realizing the full potential of the market because of privacy related concerns of the clients arising from the stringent regulatory requirements based on EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

To get better access to this market, the company decided to invest in privacy, so that it is able to provide increased assurance to potential clients in the EU and this will also benefit its US operations because privacy concerns are also on rise in the US. It will also help company leverage outsourcing opportunities in the Healthcare sector in the US which would involve protection of sensitive medical records of the US citizens. The company believes that privacy will also be a key differentiator in the cloud business going forward. In short, privacy was taken up as a strategic initiative in the company in early 2011.

Since XYZ had an internal consulting arm, it assigned the responsibility of designing and implementing an enterprise wide privacy program to the consulting arm. The consulting arm had very good expertise in information security consulting but had limited expertise in the privacy domain. The project was to be driven by CIO ' s office, in close consultation with the Corporate Information Security and Legal functions.

What role can training and awareness play here? (250 to 500 words)

There are several privacy incidents reported in an organization. The organization plans to ana lyze and learn from these incidents. Which privacy practice will the organization have to implement for the same?

Create an inventory of the specific contractual terms that explicitly mention the data protection requirements. This is an imperative of which DPF practice area?

How are privacy and data protection related to each other?

What are the criteria for deciding the role of Data Fiduciary? Tick all that apply.

In which of the following cases would an organization be more prone to risk acceptance vs. risk mitigation?

You want to assure that data is shared securely, particularly with third parties outside the organization. What protocol provides the ability to extend the network perimeter using of encapsulation and encryption?

Which of the following measures can an organization implement to establish regulatory compliance intelligence? (Choose all that apply.)

__________ layer of the DSCI Privacy Framework (DPF©) ensures that adequate level of awareness exists in an organization.