What is the purpose of a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA)?

• A. To evaluate how personal data is collected, stored, and used, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
• B. To maximize data collection regardless of privacy.
• C. To measure system performance.
• D. To reduce data storage costs.

Answer: (A)

A Privacy Impact Assessment is a structured process to examine how personal data is collected, stored, used, shared, and retained in a project or system. The main goal is to uncover privacy risks to individuals and the organization and to determine whether those risks are adequately addressed through controls and mitigations, in line with applicable privacy laws and regulations. This proactive assessment helps ensure privacy is built into a system by design and by default, promoting accountability and transparency.

The other options miss the central purpose. Maximizing data collection ignores privacy principles and legal requirements. Measuring system performance focuses on technical metrics, not privacy risk. Reducing data storage costs might be a secondary outcome of good data minimization, but it’s not the primary objective of a PIA.