STRM Privacy and your organization
STRM Privacy and your organization
In order to start using STRM Privacy in your organization you need to organize the following:
Who decides the shape and content of your event data?
The goal of STRM Privacy is to bring clarity into your event data processing, in both the shape and rules that govern the events, as well as who uses what data.
Your organization needs to decide who is responsible for deciding over schemas (the shape of the events) as well as who is responsible for their content (the data contract. This does not have to be organization wide of course, but it’s advisable that there is clear ownership for each event stream.
The schema determines what attributes exist on a certain type of event; think url,
session-id, customer-id, address, article-nr, …
The data contract determines the rules that govern these attributes:
- what content makes an attribute valid or invalid?
- which attribute indicates that events belong to a same entity?
- which attributes contain sensitive (personal) data, and for what purposes are the attributes collected and allowed to be used?
Each event must conform to a certain schema, extra fields or missing mandatory fields will not be accepted by STRM Privacy. We believe that it’s generally a good idea to have data scientists or data analysts define these schemas, and not solely the teams that are responsible for sending the events. Often, it's a collaboration between producing and consuming parties, with a Data Privacy Officer (or similar) reviewing the contract.
Determine your organization's sensitive data purposes
Event contents are governed by data contracts. These define among other things which attributes of an event contain personal data.
Your organization has to determine which attributes of an event schema contain sensitive (personal) data, and how these attributes map to the purposes that have been defined by your organization's purpose maps. These decisions are of a non-technical nature, and often correspond closely to the rules around cookie consent.
Example 1. Example purposes
0. No sensitive data
The data subject or owner does not allow any processing of sensitive data. STRM
Privacy removes the sensitive aspect of sensitive attributes by
encryption, and in this case, the encryption key will not be used for
decryption, and will be discarded as specified by the privacy algorithm.
This means that the event data can still be used for some aggregated information (like a
customer journey) but it is impossible to relate these events to an individual person.
1. Non-personalized recommendations
Customer allows recommendations based on an average over all customers
2. Personalized recommendations
Customer allows personalized recommendations
3. Personalized email marketing
Customer allows personalized email marketing
4. Contact by phone
Customer allows contact by phone
This is just an example; STRM Privacy allows for very fine-grained purpose configurations.
Collect the data subject's consent
Every STRM Privacy event embeds data subject consent, defining for which purposes the data subject consented for this event. Typically, these will be the same for a whole sequence of events, but every event is handled individually, which means that if a data subject changes consent during a sequence of events, this will be taken into account.
Your organization has to set up the mechanism that will include data subject consent in the events that are sent to STRM Privacy. For events that originate in a web-browser this can generally be done from the consent cookie, but for events that originate somewhere in a back-end system, another mechanism has to be created.
Create a stream and associated credentials
Once you’ve determined all of the above, you are ready to start sending events to STRM Privacy. You need
software that collects events and creates a STRM Privacy compatible event
a console account
a stream
stream credentials
We provide various drivers to send data to STRM Privacy. None of these drivers are mandatory, it is possible to write your own (see here). In case a language is missing, feel free to create your own driver or contact us for assistance. All the software for interacting with STRM Privacy is open-source, there’s no magic and no vendor lock-in.
Extract events
For further use of the events in your organization you have two options:
Periodically (for instance once a minute) export events to blob storage. Fully encrypted streams will be fine to use for everyone in your organization, as they no longer contain personal data.
If you have more real-time requirements, you can create a Kafka export, to allow using a standard Kafka consumer to consume events in real-time. Typical end-to-end latency is configurable, but can easily be brought under 1 second.
Decrypted streams
Assume a part of your organization requires personal data to operate. In that case one needs to
create a decrypted stream for the desired purposes
create (batch) exporters for these streams
provide those that have a need for these data with necessary credentials
start processing