Mental health bed census 2014

What is a Privacy Impact Assessment?

Any project that involves the collection of personal information inevitably gives rise to privacy concerns.

A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) helps to identify privacy risks, anticipate problems and propose solutions. It is a relatively new self-assessment process for evaluating a proposal:

• to identify its potential effects upon individual privacy and data protection compliance
• to ensure that the project complies with the data protection principles and
• to consider how any negative effects might be overcome.

What is privacy?

Privacy can be defined as follows;

'Interpreted most broadly, privacy is about the integrity of the individual. It therefore encompasses many aspects of the individual's social needs.' (Taken from the Information Commissioner's Office's PIA Handbook)

For the purposes of completing a PIA, the handbook identifies four aspects of privacy:

• the privacy of personal information
• the privacy of the person
• the privacy of personal behaviour and
• the privacy of personal communications.