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 can Sanjay do to minimize the risks of offering the product in Europe?
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 is the best way for your vendor to be clear about the Society’s breach notification expectations?
When devising effective employee policies to address a particular issue, which of the following should be included in the first draft?
SCENARIO
Please use the following lo answer the next question:
You are the privacy manager within the privacy office of a National Forest Parks and Recreation Department. While having lunch with a colleague from the IT division, you learn that the IT director has put out a request for proposal (RFP) which calls for a system that collects the personal data of park attendees.
You consult with a few other colleagues in IT and learn that the RFP is worded such that it leaves it to the vendors to demonstrate what information they would collect from people who enter parks anywhere in the country, either in a vehicle or on foot. A partial list of the information collected includes:
• personal identifiers such as name, address, age, gender;
• vehicle registration information:
• facial images of park attendees;
• health information (e.g.. physical disabilities, use of mobility devices)
The stated purpose of the RFP is to:
"Improve the National Forest. Parks, and Recreation Department's ability to track and monitor service usage thereby Increasing the robustness of our customer data and to improve service offerings.''
Companies have already started submitting proposals for software solutions that address these information gathering practices. There is only one week left before the RFP closes.
The IT department has put together an RFP evaluation team but no one from the privacy office has been a Dart of the RFP ud to this point. This occurred deposite the fact….
From a privacy management perspective, what is problematic about the "stated purpose" of the RFP?