Speed up processing GDPR Subject Access Requests

In 2018, the European Union overhauled the rules by which organizations could use, retain, and share any European citizen’s data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) spells out new and numerous regulations for the definition, processing, and protection of private user information. These new laws forced a number of companies to transform their processes in order to remain compliant.
Under GDPR rules, end users are given numerous rights with respect to their data. Among them:

• The right to know whether an entity has their data
• The right to rectification of incorrect data
• The right of erasure (e.g. “Right to be Forgotten”)
• The right to restrict processing of their data
• The right to a report of all their data in a structured format
• The right to object to their data being used at all

All of these requests could come in any form (written, electronic, etc…) and would be formally treated as a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) under the GDPR.

Organizations have a 30-day window in which to respond to DSARs. Failure to do so results in fines and escalating regulatory penalties. In addition to the defined timeline, the assessment and generation of such a report could be burdensome to an organization. It may be that the data resides in multiple, non-connected systems or there may be a backlog a limited team is attempting to work through. Manual searches for all related data are prone to human error, increasing the risk of a regulatory infraction.

Automation Hero can rapidly and intelligently assess DSAR requests, expediting the process as well as keeping identified users in the loop for validation and verification.

Here’s how it works: Automation Hero can create an automation that looks at both an email server and a shared network location for manually scanned documents. We can process the record through an AI intent detection model to determine a number of things: Is this process in fact related to a GDPR request? What kind of DSAR request is it? These initial steps might also include an intelligent OCR model to read scanned images.

Then we might extract critical data fields from unstructured text, utilizing branching logic to treat each request on a dedicated workflow path, and integrate with multiple systems to collect all the required data. Automation Hero would then aggregate the compiled data into a dedicated, consistent response format. We can also send the data through Robin, our personal automation assistant, for user review and correction.

Submit validated data to the customer, per the request
Log metric data for future efficiency assessment

In the end, the benefits of automating such requests through our end-to-end platform include the ability to integrate with multiple, disparate systems, and the ability to minimize errors or handle errors and outbound communication as the flow progresses.