SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Perhaps Jack Kelly should have stayed in the U.S. He enjoys a formidable reputation inside the company, Special Handling Shipping, for his work in reforming certain "rogue" offices. Last year, news broke that a police sting operation had revealed a drug ring operating in the Providence, Rhode Island office in the United States. Video from the office's video surveillance cameras leaked to news operations showed a drug exchange between Special Handling staff and undercover officers.
In the wake of this incident, Kelly had been sent to Providence to change the "hands off" culture that upper management believed had let the criminal elements conduct their illicit transactions. After a few weeks under Kelly's direction, the office became a model of efficiency and customer service. Kelly monitored his workers' activities using the same cameras that had recorded the illegal conduct of their former co-workers.
Now Kelly has been charged with turning around the office in Cork, Ireland, another trouble spot. The company has received numerous reports of the staff leaving the office unattended. When Kelly arrived, he found that even when present, the staff often spent their days socializing or conducting personal business on their mobile phones. Again, he observed their behaviors using surveillance cameras. He issued written reprimands to six staff members based on the first day of video alone.
Much to Kelly's surprise and chagrin, he and the company are now under investigation by the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland for allegedly violating the privacy rights of employees. Kelly was told that the
company's license for the cameras listed facility security as their main use, but he does not know why this matters. He has pointed out to his superiors that the company's training programs on privacy protection and data collection mention nothing about surveillance video.
You are a privacy protection consultant, hired by the company to assess this incident, report on the legal and compliance issues, and recommend next steps.
What should you advise this company regarding the status of security cameras at their offices in the United States?
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.
After conducting research, you discover a primary data protection issue with cloud computing. Which of the following should be your biggest concern?
The theft of proprietary information could have best been prevented by?
What is the main function of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Privacy Framework?
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Penny has recently joined Ace Space, a company that sells homeware accessories online, as its new privacy officer. The company is based in California but thanks to some great publicity from a social media influencer last year, the company has received an influx of sales from the EU and has set up a regional office in Ireland to support this expansion. To become familiar with Ace Space’s practices and assess what her privacy priorities will be, Penny has set up meetings with a number of colleagues to hear about the work that they have been doing and their compliance efforts.
Penny’s colleague in Marketing is excited by the new sales and the company’s plans, but is also concerned that Penny may curtail some of the growth opportunities he has planned. He tells her “I heard someone in the breakroom talking about some new privacy laws but I really don’t think it affects us. We’re just a small company. I mean we just sell accessories online, so what’s the real risk?” He has also told her that he works with a number of small companies that help him get projects completed in a hurry. “We’ve got to meet our deadlines otherwise we lose money. I just sign the contracts and get Jim in finance to push through the payment. Reviewing the contracts takes time that we just don’t have.”
In her meeting with a member of the IT team, Penny has learned that although Ace Space has taken a number of precautions to protect its website from malicious activity, it has not taken the same level of care of its physical files or internal infrastructure. Penny’s colleague in IT has told her that a former employee lost an encrypted USB key with financial data on it when he left. The company nearly lost access to their customer database last year after they fell victim to a phishing attack. Penny is told by her IT colleague that the IT team “didn’t know what to do or who should do what. We hadn’t been trained on it but we’re a small team though, so it worked out OK in the end.” Penny is concerned that these issues will compromise Ace Space’s privacy and data protection.
Penny is aware that the company has solid plans to grow its international sales and will be working closely with the CEO to give the organization a data “shake up”. Her mission is to cultivate a strong privacy culture within the company.
Penny has a meeting with Ace Space’s CEO today and has been asked to give her first impressions and an overview of her next steps.
To help Penny and her CEO with their objectives, what would be the most helpful approach to address her IT concerns?
(The best way for an organization to stay aware of changes made by vendors that may then impact the organization’s privacy practices is to?)
Read the following steps:
Perform frequent data back-ups.
Perform test restorations to verify integrity of backed-up data.
Maintain backed-up data offline or on separate servers.
These steps can help an organization recover from what?
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?
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Martin Briseño is the director of human resources at the Canyon City location of the U.S. hotel chain Pacific Suites. In 1998, Briseño 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 Briseño 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 Briseño’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. Briseño 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.
What key mistake set the company up to be vulnerable to a security breach?
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next question:
Liam is the newly appointed information technology (IT) compliance manager at Mesa, a USbased outdoor clothing brand with a global E-commerce presence. During his second week, he is contacted by the company’s IT audit manager, who informs him that the auditing team will be conducting a review of Mesa’s privacy compliance risk in a month.
A bit nervous about the audit, Liam asks his boss what his predecessor had completed related to privacy compliance before leaving the company. Liam is told that a consent management tool had been added to the website and they commissioned a privacy risk evaluation from a small consulting firm last year that determined that their risk exposure was relatively low given their current control environment. After reading the consultant’s report, Liam realized that the scope of the assessment was limited to breach notification laws in the US and the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Not wanting to let down his new team, Liam kept his concerns about the report to himself and figured he could try to put some additional controls into place before the audit. Having some privacy compliance experience in his last role, Liam thought he might start by having discussions with the E-commerce and marketing teams.
The E-commerce Director informed him that they were still using the cookie consent tool forcibly placed on the home screen by the CIO, but could not understand the point since their office was not located in California or Europe. The marketing director touted his department’s success with purchasing email lists and taking a shotgun approach to direct marketing. Both directors highlighted their tracking tools on the website to enhance customer experience while learning more about where else the customer had shopped. The more people Liam met with, the more it became apparent that privacy awareness and the general control environment at Mesa needed help.
With three weeks before the audit, Liam updated Mesa's Privacy Notice himself, which was taken and revised from a competitor’s website. He also wrote policies and procedures outlining the roles and responsibilities for privacy within Mesa and distributed the document to all departments he knew of with access to personal information.
During this time. Liam also filled the backlog of data subject requests for deletion that had been sent to him by the customer service manager. Liam worked with application owners to remove these individual's information and order history from the customer relationship management (CRM) tool, the enterprise resource planning (ERP). the data warehouse and the email server.
At the audit kick-off meeting. Liam explained to his boss and her team that there may still be some room for improvement, but he thought the risk had been mitigated to an appropriate level based on the work he had done thus far.
After the audit had been completed, the audit manager and Liam met to discuss her team’s findings, and much to his dismay. Liam was told that none of the work he had completed prior to the audit followed best practices for governance and risk mitigation. In fact, his actions only opened the company up to additional risk and scrutiny. Based on these findings. Liam worked with external counsel and an established privacy consultant to develop a remediation plan.
Why do Mesa's E-commerce and marketing efforts need to be compliant with the GDPR?
