How Data Subject Access Request Solutions Can Help Your Company Comply

As modern life and the internet become increasingly intertwined, consumers today are wiser about the amount of attention their personal information receives. Many consumers want more control over the data they share with companies or businesses they interact with. This is central to most data protection laws worldwide, including the high-profile General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

While the specific data privacy rights differ depending on regulation and jurisdiction, the laws generally relate to certain key concepts. These concepts you must be aware of include the right to determine which information you collect, the right to transparency on how this information is collected, and the right to control how the data is processed. Consumers can exercise these rights through data subject access requests (DSARs).

With the emergence of new data privacy laws, if your business collects and processes personal information for its operations, it's necessary to manage a growing number of compliance obligations and demands of a privacy-conscious public.

As more data privacy laws are enacted, DSARs have become a highly scrutinized aspect of privacy compliance and data governance. As a business, failure to respond accurately to DSARs can result in severe legal, financial, and reputational consequences.

DSARs are complex and nuanced, and your company needs to understand the rights surrounding them and how data subjects may exercise these rights. One of the major pain points for many businesses that collect consumer data is the challenges in accurately managing DSARs in the timeframes stipulated by data protection regulations.

Fortunately, Adzapier provides an end-to-end data subject access request solution that your company can leverage to comply with applicable privacy laws.

What is a Data Subject Access Request?

A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) is a formal inquiry that a data subject can make to your company regarding the personal information you have collected, stored, or processed. A data subject can also submit a request to ask that you take certain actions with their data.

Although “access” is part of the term, a DSAR enables data subjects to delete their data, correct incorrect information, decide whom you share the data with, opt out of future data collection, and more. There are no special conditions a consumer must satisfy to make an access request as long as you collect and process their data.

The Steps Required to Fulfill a DSAR

1. Register, log, and authenticate the DSAR

The first step is registering and logging the data request into a record system. You must then authenticate or verify the user to determine if you have the requested information and can safely distribute it.

2. Clarify the nature of the DSAR

You must review the request to determine the information the data subject requires. This allows you to determine how fast you can fulfill the request or if you'll need more time, which you must explain to the requester.

3. Collect and review the data

To fulfill a DSAR, you must discover and categorize the personal information, which is often stored in multiple systems. You must map this data to the data subject to facilitate the DSAR’s processing.

You must collect this data safely to avoid data sprawl that causes liabilities. After collecting the information, you must review it to ensure it meets the DSAR requirements.

4. Deliver the information safely

The final step is submitting the final report to the requester securely and in an easily accessible manner. It’s important to document communications with data subjects for audit purposes.

The Importance of Data Subject Access Request Solutions

If your company is served with a DSAR, you have a legal obligation to fulfill the requests free of charge and in an accessible form within a certain timeframe to stay compliant. Accurate and speedy fulfillment of DSARs boosts your brand image significantly while ensuring compliance.

However, fulfilling each DSAR requires gathering data across multiple systems, consolidating the data in one place, going through the records, and compiling the data in a comprehensive report.

If your company relies on ad-hoc internal and manual processes, it can take weeks to fulfill each DSAR, making it unfeasible to handle large DSAR volumes. This is why an effective data subject request tool that automates the process is necessary.

Data subject access request solutions from Adzapier help your business accurately respond within the stipulated timeframes, especially if you deal with many requests, a high likelihood in the emerging privacy landscape.

What to Look For In Data Subject Access Request Solutions

Among the major challenges of DSAR management are data proliferation, third-party relationships, and sheer volume. An end-to-end data subject access request solution helps address these challenges.

An effective DSAR solution should be able to handle large DSAR volume at scale and allow your company to fulfill DSARs by accounting for your full data inventory and data flows.

Live data maps and inventories are key aspects of a data subject access request tool. To successfully manage DSAR volume, you have to start from a simple but crucial foundation – an accurate understanding of the data your company possesses, where you store the data, and with whom you share the data.

Once your company receives a valid DSAR, there are several critical steps you must take, including:

Identify the information you have on the data subject across all processing operations and departments.
Identify where the information resides.
Identify which of your vendors are processing the data.

Adzapier's data subject access request solution features integration with live data maps and continuously updated data inventory to help your company with data lifecycle management, cross-functional data management, and data processor management.

If your company lacks full visibility into these aspects, you will either fail to identify the data within the DSAR's scope or respond within the required timeframe. This may result in an incomplete or inaccurate response and a potential violation of data privacy laws.

Get Compliant with Adzapier’s Data Subject Access Request Solutions

Our easy-to-use DSAR management platform helps you automate the DSAR fulfillment process, keeping your company compliant while providing control to your customers.

With single-day setup and integration, our automated solution will help your company meet legal obligations for data access, correction, deletion, and opt-out of sale requests within minutes.

Our data subject access request tool is a secure platform to receive, screen, and authenticate DSARs within a framework that leverages email and re-captcha. You can create custom DSAR intake forms and embed them onto your website on our user-friendly privacy access center. This enables you to streamline requests for timely processing.

DSAR integration connects multiple data depositories allowing you to search for relevant data subject information for easy discovery. Our solution streamlines the end-to-end DSAR fulfillment process within one dashboard to minimize risk potential and help you save valuable time.

Through our platform, your business can keep and organize data collection and DSAR processing records for audit and accountability purposes.

Compliance with data privacy laws is a major concern for companies that collect, store, and process consumer data today. Adzapier understands that DSAR compliance can be nuanced and complicated. Leveraging a robust platform that can guide and manage the workflows associated with DSARs can be a company’s biggest asset in today’s data protection and privacy landscape.

As such, we have developed one of the most comprehensive data subject access request solutions to help you simplify this critical business process.

How Data Subject Access Request Solutions Can Help Your Company Comply With Emerging Privacy Laws