What Exactly Is a DPIA?
A DPIA is a documented review of how a particular activity involving personal data may affect the people whose data is used. It asks four simple things. What data are we handling? Why? What can go wrong for the individual? What are we doing about it?
Many companies assume that this is a task for the legal department. In my experience, that approach fails. The legal team knows the law, but only the engineers know how the data really moves, only the security team knows where it is exposed, and only the product team knows why a feature was designed in a particular way. A good DPIA needs all of them in one room.
There is another benefit that gets overlooked. A completed DPIA is proof of diligence. If an investor, a large enterprise customer or a regulator asks how you evaluated privacy before launch, you have a dated and signed record to show.
