Privacy Management release notes

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Privacy Management release notes - Yokohama Release

    The ServiceNow® Privacy Management application helps organizations manage privacy risks and compliance to protect customers, employees, and suppliers. The Yokohama release introduces enhancements that simplify privacy assessments, improve data classification, and streamline privacy case management.

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    Key Features

    • Criticality Factors Integration: Evaluate initial risks of processing activities using criticality factors integrated directly into privacy assessments. This generates a criticality score automatically upon assessment approval and updates processing activities, reducing the need for separate criticality assessments and decreasing workload for privacy teams.
    • Smart Assessment Engine: Enhanced assessment experience enables capturing detailed data elements, information object attributes, and hierarchies within assessments. This eliminates the need to update processing activities separately and allows privacy case analysts to perform assessments on privacy case action tasks.
    • Information Object (IO) Categories: Configure categories such as biometric data or contact information to classify information objects accurately. This aligns data management with regulatory classifications (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), improves clarity for business users, and supports structured data governance.
    • Improved Tagging: Information objects are now tagged using the Data classification field instead of the tag icon, enhancing consistency in data categorization.
    • Streamlined Privacy Assessment Initiation: When starting a privacy assessment from an entity or processing activity, a pop-up window now allows specification of assessment details directly, replacing redirection to a separate form.

    Activation and Usage

    Privacy Management must be installed via the ServiceNow Store. After installation, enable Smart Assessments for privacy case management action tasks using the provided system property (default is enabled). This feature allows assessments to be sent when action tasks move from Draft to Assigned state.

    Key Outcomes

    • Reduced workload for privacy teams by consolidating risk evaluations and improving assessment workflows.
    • Improved compliance through accurate classification and tracking of personal data categories aligned with regulations.
    • Enhanced user experience with simplified assessment initiation and centralized data updates.
    • Streamlined privacy case management with integrated assessment capabilities in action tasks.

    The ServiceNow® Privacy Management application enables you to manage your organization's privacy risks and compliance to protect your customers, employees, and suppliers. Privacy Management was enhanced and updated in the Yokohama release.

    Privacy Management highlights for the Yokohama release

    • Integrate criticality factors into assessments and processing activities thereby simplifying the assessment process, and reducing the workload for privacy teams.
    • Use the Smart Assessment Engine to capture details regarding information objects and hierarchies, updating all details within the assessments and eliminating the need to separately update processing activities.
    • Implement information Object (IO) categories such as biometric data, to align with regulatory classifications and bridge the gap between requirements and user understanding.
    • Empower privacy case analysts to perform assessments on privacy cases using the Smart Assessment Engine

    See Privacy Management for more information.

    Important:
    Privacy Management is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

    New in the Yokohama release

    Leverage criticality factors to evaluate the initial risks associated with processing activities. Integrate these factors into privacy assessments and automatically generate a criticality score upon assessment approval. These factors are also added to processing activities, enabling you to make updates at any time. Integrating these factors in a privacy assessment eliminates the need for a separate criticality assessment. This consolidation reduces the workload for the privacy teams.
    Smart assessments in Privacy Management
    Use the new and improved assessment experience that enables:
    • capturing the data elements, the information object attributes, hierarchies
    • building the assessment questionnaire
    This new experience enables responders to update all the necessary details within the assessments, eliminating the need to update the processing activity separately.
    Configure information object categories
    Implement Information object categories to tag and classify information objects effectively. For example, attributes like iris scans and fingerprints are often referred to as biometric data, or email addresses and phone numbers can be tagged as contact information. Information object categories enable you to categorize these information objects under these broader classifications. This approach is useful in the following ways:
    • Enhances compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and so on by accurately capturing and tracking required data categories.
    • Improves clarity for business users, ensuring they can easily identify and work with terms they’re familiar with while adhering to regulatory standards.
    • Streamlines data governance by creating a structured framework that supports both regulatory needs and business operations.
    Smart assessment for privacy case management action tasks
    Use the new assessment experience of Smart Assessment Engine for privacy case action tasks. Only when an action task moves from the Draft to the Assigned state, the assessment can be sent. To use the smart assessment, a new property called enable_smart_assessments (sn_grc_case_mgmt.enable_smart_assessments) is introduced with the default value as true.

    Changed in this release

    Tagging of information object tags
    Use the Data classification field to tag information objects instead of using the tag icon.
    Initiating privacy assessment
    When you initiate a privacy assessment from either an entity or a processing activity, you’re no longer redirected to the Create new privacy assessment form, instead, a new pop-up window appears where you can specify all the assessment details.

    Activation information

    Install Privacy Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.