As one of the strongest data privacy regulations in the United States, the CCPA requires organizations subject to its rules and standards to safeguard the privacy of customers’ data. Part of this process means ensuring your staff is aware of the CCPA data security awareness requirements. Read on to learn more about CCPA data security and how to stay compliant.
What are the CCPA Data Security Awareness Requirements?
Compared to other privacy regulations in the United States, the CCPA is one of the most stringent and expansive. To fully comply with the CCPA regulations, businesses must incorporate data security awareness training into their data privacy programs.
This blog will dive into how these businesses can do so by providing:
- An overview of the CCPA privacy rights
- A breakdown of the CCPA data security awareness requirements
- An explanation of how data security awareness applies to CCPA regulations
CCPA compliance is critical to safeguarding consumers’ data privacy rights and will help your organization avoid costly non-compliance fines and penalties. With the help of a CCPA compliance partner, you can improve CCPA data security awareness across your business.
What is the CCPA?
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) was established to protect the data privacy rights of consumers in California by providing them more control over their data as businesses collect and use it.
CCPA data security awareness starts with understanding what types of information are considered sensitive personal data. According to the CCPA, personal data is any information that can be connected to an individual and uniquely identifies that individual.
Sensitive personal information may include:
- Social security and driver’s license information
- Sensitive account information (e.g., credit and debit card numbers, access credentials)
- Consumers’ precise geolocation
- Identifiers of racial and ethnic origin
- Genetic or other biometric data
If your company processes any of these data belonging to or concerning residents of California, you may be subject to the CCPA regulations and must protect consumer privacy rights.
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CCPA Privacy Rights
To increase your internal data security awareness, your staff must understand the CCPA consumer privacy rights and how they apply to business processes.
The main consumer privacy rights listed in the CCPA include:
- The right to know – Consumers have the right to know which information a business collects about them and how the business uses or shares it.
- The right to delete – Consumers can request businesses to delete the personal information they collected, with special exceptions.
- The right to opt-out – Consumers can opt out of the sale of their personal information.
- The right to non-discrimination – When consumers choose to exercise their privacy rights, businesses cannot discriminate against them.
Any organization subject to the CCPA must respect these privacy rights and protections. Failure to do so can result in significant fines, penalties, and other related legal consequences.
Who Must Comply with the CCPA?
CCPA compliance is required for businesses that operate in California and:
- Have a gross annual revenue greater than or equal to $25 million
- Collect, process, or share the personal data of 50,000 or more consumers per year
- Obtain 50% or more of their gross annual revenue from the sale of consumers’ data
Businesses exempted from CCPA compliance include:
- Healthcare institutions, which are expected to comply with the HIPAA Rules
- Financial institutions, such as those subject to FINRA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
- Organizations that process publicly available data, as it is not considered protected
In addition, CCPA compliance is not required for non-profit or governmental organizations.
Breakdown of CCPA Data Security Awareness Requirements
The best way to keep your staff fully abreast of the CCPA data privacy and security requirements is to conduct ongoing data security awareness training. Doing so equips them to understand how these regulations impact day-to-day operations and consumers’ privacy rights.
Let’s explore some of the crucial requirements:
Detection and Mitigation of Security Threats
CCPA data protection awareness training should ensure that your staff is fully aware of the potential security threats to sensitive consumer personal data.
The CCPA specifically mandates businesses that collect consumers’ personal data to “implement reasonable security procedures and practices appropriate to the nature of the personal information to protect the personal information from unauthorized or illegal access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure.”
Although these procedures and practices might seem broad, your staff should receive training on how to:
- Conduct routine threat and vulnerability assessments to identify potential risks to consumers’ personal data
- Implement automated scanning techniques such as penetration testing to detect gaps in security perimeters with access to sensitive data environments
- Evaluate and verify CCPA compliance for service providers and contractors
- Conduct privacy impact assessments where processing activities might pose risks to data privacy and security
- Respond to security incidents, should they occur
In many ways, risks to data privacy can impact data security and threaten the overall integrity of your IT infrastructure. Providing your staff with CCPA data security awareness training will help them promptly detect privacy and security threats before they can affect other digital assets.
Required CCPA Notices
Another critical component of the CCPA’s consumer data privacy protections is ensuring consumers are fully aware of what businesses do with the personal data they collect.
To that effect, the CCPA requires businesses to provide several notices to customers:
- “Notice at collection” – When a business collects data from its customers, it must provide a notice containing the:
- Types of personal information the business is collecting from the consumers
- Purpose(s) for collecting these types of information
- Option for consumers to decline the sale of their personal data to other businesses.
- Privacy policy – Businesses subject to the CCPA regulations must provide consumers with a privacy policy that details how:
- The business collects, uses, shares, or sells their personal data
- Consumers can exercise their CCPA privacy rights
Data security awareness training should ensure staff complies with the CCPA regulations to make CCPA notices available and visible to consumers, especially when websites are being updated.
Personal Data Mapping
Your staff should also be aware of the types of data you process on a day-to-day basis and where these data are located across your IT infrastructure. Data security awareness training should involve aspects of personal data mapping to empower your staff to understand which risks may impact data when it is collected, stored, or processed.
Updates to the CCPA – The CPRA
Passed at the end of 2020 as an expansion of the CCPA privacy rights, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) regulations provide even more robust privacy protections for California consumers than the CCPA. The CPRA will become effective starting January 2023.
Besides the four rights listed in the CCPA, the CPRA provides two additional rights:
- The right for consumers to limit how businesses use or disclose their personal information (i.e., request restrictions or other specifications on usage)
- The right for consumers to request businesses to correct any inaccuracies in their personal data without any penalties to the consumers
When it comes to CPRA data security awareness, businesses must ensure their staff is aware of the annual cybersecurity audit requirement.
The CPRA places a greater emphasis on businesses conducting security risk assessments and audits to mitigate data breach risks. The scope of annual cybersecurity audits must be fully defined and the audits must be comprehensive and independent. The most effective way to remain compliant with the CCPA/CPRA and implement a reliable CCPA/CPRA data security awareness training program is to partner with a trusted CCPA/CPRA compliance partner.
Enhance Your CCPA/CPRA Data Security Awareness
To protect the sensitivity and privacy of consumers’ data year-round, you will likely need your staff to receive data security awareness training. The CCPA/CPRA regulations provide stringent privacy controls that will help staff across your business implement robust data privacy and mitigate data breach risks, especially with guidance from a CCPA/CPRA compliance specialist.
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