You may know the term "audit" from quality management. An audit checks the functionality of the quality management system introduced within a company.

Audit is to be understood in the same way in the area of data privacy. A data privacy audit is supposed to check the effectiveness of the data privacy measures. It provides an overview of the effectiveness of the measures introduced in the company to the management, and it can also speed up a data privacy review of the company by the data protection supervisory authority, since an audit report can be used.

Data privacy is a topic in the current ISO 9000/2015 audit procedure (process-orientation, further education). Some automotive manufacturers put quite some focus to data privacy in their supplier audits. In these cases, data privacy is certainly not the main focus of the audits, but it gets clear that data privacy is becoming more and more important.