Privacy as Risk Assessment and Risk Mitigation

Privacy as Risk Assessment and Risk Mitigation

Learn how to design organizations that manage risk

How do Organizations think about Privacy?

A common approach is to extrapolate user/customer/citizen expectations on Privacy to that of the organization and expect magic. However, this is a mistake because organizations are not human beings, but are amorphous legal entities that strive to create an existence for themselves, by selling products and services in the market place. Organizations therefore view Privacy very differently.

The perspective that defines their approach is that of Risk - the probability that doing something or not doing something has an impact on their business. If Risk is the lens through which organizations view Privacy in their products and services, what are the mental models through which they manage it?

Broadly, Privacy as Risk comprises of the following:

  1. Technology - Algorithms, Products, Technology Stack signify how organizations manage Risk.
  2. Law of the Land - is a very significant driver for how organizations assess Risk. Here, State capacity, Institutions and Intent, all play a part.
  3. Internal Policies - both Technology and Law of the Land inform and nudge internal company policies to work, organize in a certain way, and implement, manage and assess Risk.
  4. Bureaucracy - while bureaucracy is typically thought of as having a negative connotation, in reality, no organization - be it the government or the private sector - can ever function without a bureaucracy. The structure of the bureaucracy plays an important role in managing risk.
  5. Budget - While individuals sustain themselves on ‘food flows’, organizations sustain themselves on ‘cash flows’. Thus, no amount of good intent is sufficient without the required structure in place supported by a budget allocation.

With the upcoming PDP bill, it becomes imperative for organizations to assess their Privacy preparedness through the prism of Risk across all the above models.

Programme: Privacy Mode will organize a series of talks, publications, group discussions, best practices on the above topics, at a regular cadence - fourth Friday of every month - showcasing the work of industry practitioners and their experiences.

Audience and speaker personas:

  1. Technology - Senior Developers, Architects, CTOs, UX Designers, DevOps architects.
  2. Law of the Land - Lawyers, Legal Counsels for Organizations.
  3. Internal Policies - Lawyers, Legal Counsels, VPs and above.
  4. Bureaucracy - Engineering Managers and above.
  5. Budget - CFO, Compliance Officers and Board.

Key takeaway for participants:
Through this programme, participants will learn how to design organizations - from top to bottom - that manage privacy risk.

Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more

Supported by

Omidyar Network India invests in bold entrepreneurs who help create a meaningful life for every Indian, especially the hundreds of millions of Indians in low-income and lower-middle-income populations, ranging from the poorest among us to the existing middle class. To drive empowerment and social i… more
Deep dives into privacy and security, and understanding needs of the Indian tech ecosystem through guides, research, collaboration, events and conferences. Sponsors: Privacy Mode’s programmes are sponsored by: more

sandesh anand

@anandsandesh

Satyaki Sanyal

@sanyalsatyaki

Answer Key Security Questions by Building an Automated Asset Inventory

Submitted Mar 8, 2022

We cannot protect what we don’t know exists. A key part of building security into our products is to make key security decisions based on data and not intuition or tribal knowledge alone. In Razorpay, we have hundreds of microservices deployed across multiple EKS clusters, some of which deploy multiple times each day. Any manually built inventory will be out of date within a few hours. In this talk, we will talk about how we built an automated software asset inventory that solves this problem by answering questions such as:

  • What AWS services does a given application use?
  • Which applications run on a given subdomain?
  • Which applications have write access to a given AWS service (e.g.: S3 bucket)?
  • For a given business unit, how many “high” risk defects are still open and for how long have they been open?
  • Which applications use a particular programming language (useful when incidents such as Log4J strike)?
  • List “High” risk applications which have not gone through a security review for over 12 months

We will demonstrate how the application collects data from various AWS services (100+ S3 buckets, 3000+ subdomains from Route 53, IAM, KMS and so on) and other sources ( Github, Jira, Harbor, app manifests etc.) to help answer key security questions and present them in Looker dashboards for on-demand consumption.

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Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more

Supported by

Omidyar Network India invests in bold entrepreneurs who help create a meaningful life for every Indian, especially the hundreds of millions of Indians in low-income and lower-middle-income populations, ranging from the poorest among us to the existing middle class. To drive empowerment and social i… more
Deep dives into privacy and security, and understanding needs of the Indian tech ecosystem through guides, research, collaboration, events and conferences. Sponsors: Privacy Mode’s programmes are sponsored by: more