Practical Privacy for Products and Services

via Coursera

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Details

Go to class

Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

8 weeks, 1 hour a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

Found in

Part of

Foundations of AI Privacy and Blockchain

Overview

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Data is one of the most valuable assets your organization holds, and it is also one of its greatest liabilities. Every customer record, employee file, and behavioral data point creates legal, ethical, and operational obligations, and the consequences of getting privacy wrong range from regulatory sanctions to permanent damage to the trust your customers place in you. In this course, you'll identify what counts as personal data across your organization, classify it by sensitivity, and map every third party that touches it. You'll assess data processing risks using a structured probability-and-impact framework, draft internal privacy policies and external notices that meet regulatory requirements, and build training programs that turn your workforce into active privacy advocates. You'll then apply privacy-by-design principles across the full data lifecycle, from obtaining consent and collecting data securely to archiving and destroying records responsibly when their usefulness ends. By the end of this course, you'll be equipped to design, implement, and maintain a comprehensive privacy program that protects your customers, your employees, and your organization's long-term reputation.

Syllabus

Recognizing and Categorizing Personal Data

Your customers and employees trust you with information that, in the wrong hands, can cause real harm, and that trust starts with knowing exactly what counts as personal data and what doesn't. In this module, you'll build a working model of personally identifiable information across its major categories, distinguish it from data that falls outside privacy protection rules, and establish the practical foundation you need to scope your organization's privacy obligations with precision and confidence.

Building a Data Inventory and Managing Processors

Your organization almost certainly holds more personal data than any single team realizes, and the third parties who touch that data may outnumber the ones you can name from memory. In this module, you'll build a structured approach to locating and classifying personal data across your organization's systems, map the processing roles that determine your legal and contractual obligations, and apply the contract clauses that protect your data subjects when you work with external processors.

Assessing Data Processing Risks

Every data processing operation you run carries risk, and the teams that contain it best are the ones that can name each threat specifically before it becomes an incident. In this module, you'll move from recognizing the specific mistakes and biases that make data processing risky to applying a structured probability-and-impact methodology that turns risk awareness into a defensible organizational action plan.

Establishing Privacy Policies and Training Programs

Your privacy program will not fail for lack of good intentions; it will fail if you never build the documented structures that turn those intentions into accountable, repeatable practice. In this module, you'll build the documentation and communication architecture of a functioning privacy program, from the internal policies and external notices that establish organizational accountability, to the training programs and breach communication procedures that ensure your organization can act on its commitments when it matters most.

Designing Privacy-Safe Data Collection Processes

Data collection is where your privacy obligations begin, and it is where you are most likely to fail, not through malice but by never building protection in before the data arrives. In this module, you'll map the full data lifecycle to understand where collection fits in your organization's privacy obligations, implement consent mechanisms that genuinely inform data subjects before their data is gathered, and apply minimization and privacy-enhancing techniques that reduce the scope of what your systems collect and retain.

Protecting Stored and Processed Data

The safeguards you rely on most, encryption, access controls, and masking, are only the appearance of protection when they lack key management, periodic review, and server-side enforcement, and they fail in exactly the ways attackers and auditors look for. In this module, you'll select and evaluate the technical protection mechanisms that secure personal data while it is stored, apply access control and privacy-enhancing techniques to processing activities, and audit disclosure processes for the specific failure modes that most commonly expose personal data to the wrong parties.

Securing Data Transfer, Archival, and Destruction

The final phases of the lifecycle are where the rights your data subjects care about most, taking their data and having it erased, collide with the data you forget: records sitting in archives and on decommissioned equipment long after their intended end. In this module, you'll design identity-verified data transfer processes that protect against social engineering attacks, apply archive governance strategies that can satisfy erasure obligations without eliminating the utility of backups, and execute secure destruction procedures for both digital data and physical equipment.

Conclusion

You have reached the point where the real work begins: building organizational support for what you have designed, staying current as regulation and technology shift, and helping the people around you develop privacy awareness of their own. In this module, you'll consolidate the frameworks you have built throughout the course, apply them to a forward-looking action plan for your organization, and identify the professional communities and resources that will keep your privacy practice current.