Mandatory Law vs. Program Design: A Global Privacy Governance Checklist

By Dr. SK, CIPT, PMP

Every organization must meet the legal minimum—but real success comes from proactively building the Recommended column: the controls that let you scale globally without chaos.

If you are only doing the left column, you are a reactive fire-fighter. If you are building the right column, you are an architect.

How to Use This Checklist

Use this checklist to map your current program. Mark where you already meet the right-column design criteria, and where you’re still operating on legal minimums.

Mandatory Legal Compliance (Must-Do)
Recommended Program Design (Should-Do)
🔍 Data Inventory
🔍 Data Inventory
Maintain a Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) (GDPR Article 30).
Data Flow Mapping tied to system owners, data catalogs, and continuous monitoring.
🛡️ Security Foundation
🛡️ Security Foundation
Reasonable Security Measures (vague standard in most US laws).
Certified Information Security Management System (ISMS) (e.g., ISO 27001:2022).
⏱️ Retention
⏱️ Retention
Policy specifying retention periods (required by GDPR, CCPA, etc.).
Automated Deletion/Archiving jobs tied to retention policy fields in the schema (No human input needed).
🛑 Risk Assessment
🛑 Risk Assessment
PIA/DPIA only for high-risk processing (GDPR, CPRA, VCDPA triggers).
Privacy Risk Triage integrated into the standard development lifecycle (SDLC) for all new projects.
👤 Data Subject Rights
👤 Data Subject Rights
Mechanism to Respond to DSARs (Access, Deletion, Correction) within legal deadlines.
Automated DSR Fulfillment across all systems, supported by granular data lineage and ownership.
🤝 Vendor Management
🤝 Vendor Management
Contractual Mandates for data protection (SCCs, DPIAs on third parties).
Continuous Vendor Risk Monitoring and security testing (audits, penetration tests).
🚨 Incident Management
🚨 Incident Management
Mandatory Reporting of certain breaches to regulators/consumers within tight deadlines.
Forensic Audit Capability (logging, tracking, and evidence preservation for privacy incidents) with a defined tabletop exercise schedule.
🎓 Training
🎓 Training
Basic Awareness Training (annual, usually a video to check the box).
Role-Specific Training (Engineers learn PbD, Legal learns data flow architecture, etc.).

Why the Recommended Column is Non-Negotiable

For the practitioner, the "Recommended" column isn't extra work—it's debt reduction.

  1. Stop Decoding, Start Designing: Requirements like "Reasonable Security" and "Privacy by Design" become implementable only when they are translated into control frameworks like ISO 27001. ISO provides the grammar that Legal and Engineering can use.
  2. Global Efficiency: By designing to the GDPR/ISO ceiling, you automatically comply with the lower-level requirements of nearly all new US state laws (CCPA, VCDPA, etc.). You build once, rather than patching every time a state legislature passes a new law.
  3. Audit Defense: Compliance is about documentation. Audit is about evidence. Frameworks like ISO 27001 force the continuous creation of evidence, making external audits or internal reviews predictable rather than terrifying.

Build the right-column habits early. They’re not “extras”; they’re the infrastructure of every mature privacy program.

ISO 27001:2022 Control Mapping

Control Area
ISO 27001:2022 Mapping
Security Foundation
A.5.1, A.5.33
Retention & Deletion
A.8.10
Audit & Evidence
A.5.32

© Privacy Atelier | CC BY-NC 4.0 | Examples are composites.