Personal information discovery

To protect your personal information, you first need to identify it and appropriately classify it.

It is important to know:

  • Where your data is stored.
    This is critical to helping you respond to individual rights requests, such as a request "to be forgotten". To respond appropriately, you need to be able to quickly know where personal information exists across your organization.
  • Why you're storing the data, meaning the business and legal context.
    Generally speaking, you should not store data that is not critical to your business processes. However, some personal information needs to be kept to comply with legal obligations. Consider, for example, an individual's request to be forgotten. With this request, the individual's personal information will have to be deleted from most systems, but it can't be deleted if it is needed to comply with a legal obligation.

Tip Follow our course Discover Your Sensitive Personal Information, on Collibra University.

How does Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud help you discover your personal information?

Your Privacy team first has to create a data class policy and standards, data categories and data attributes. Your Governance team then takes over, mapping these privacy policy-defining assets to your personal information assets, thereby endowing them with all the required attributes and relations. This mapping is aided greatly by Automatic Data Classification. Data Privacy is integrated with Catalog, allowing you to leverage Catalog's Automatic Data Classification capabilities to discover and classify your personal information.

Furthermore, after classifying a single column from a table, you can then simultaneous associate that column and all the other columns in the table with a particular data domain. This is made possible by Guided Stewardship.

Tip For the discovery of business processes, see the The Business User Interface, a user-friendly webpage that allows users to start describing their business processes and related data.