How Sun Life is leading the way in protecting privacy rights
Before launching any product, service or initiative at Sun Life, we conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to proactively address any privacy risks. This helps us ensure Clients’ privacy rights are protected from the start.
In today’s digital economy, assessing and mitigating risk to Client privacy is more crucial than ever. Our Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) tool is helping us to further embed privacy within the culture at Sun Life. This digital tool has strengthened our global privacy oversight. It’s also helping us meet evolving privacy laws, best practices and regulators’ expectations wherever we operate.
Sun Life launched the PIA process at a time when it was not very common in the private sector. We have continued to evolve and refine our process and launched our new automated global PIA tool in 2019. Our business teams must now complete a digital PIA before using personal information for an initiative. The assessment displays different questions depending on the jurisdiction, personal data processed and the initiative risk level. The assessment helps our teams to identify, document and mitigate privacy risks. As part of its evolution, the PIA now includes guidance to consider risks associated with unintended bias when using personal information for data analytics. Our PIA process further embeds our Client Data Privacy Principles.
The PIA process is generating a wealth of insights for reporting and further analysis. This analysis will help us target areas for improvement and enhance focus on higher risk initiatives. With all our global teams using the same PIA process, we can ensure standardized assessment, tracking and reporting of potential privacy risks and controls of business initiatives.
Suzanne Morin
“The improved PIA process protects the privacy of our Clients’ information, while leveraging data and analytics to deliver on our Purpose. This enhances our Client experience and makes it easier to do business with us.”
Learn more about our data security and privacy efforts.
