March 18, 2022 Release of Report on Results of Questionnaire Survey on Privacy Governance

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) release a report on the results of a questionnaire survey on privacy governance conducted for businesses and consumers (preliminary report released in October 2021).
In addition, interviews were held with 16 companies/organizations that carry out initiatives with an affinity for privacy governance, and such examples of initiatives were organized based on the three requirements to which the top management should be committed and the important issues of privacy governance.
Based on the results of this survey, METI and MIC will continue promoting the dissemination and awareness-raising of a publication entitled “Guidebook for Corporate Privacy Governance in the DX Era,” which outlines what companies should do to build privacy governance.

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  Corporate privacy governance refers to the commitment of the management to proactively address privacy issues and the establishment and functioning of a system for addressing privacy issues throughout the organization to enhance the corporate value through the appropriate risk management of privacy issues and trust securement.

1．Background

In the accelerating DX era, there is a growing demand for privacy protection as well as solutions to social issues through the creation of innovation. Against this background, in August 2020, METI and MIC had a Study Group on the Model of Corporate Privacy Governance (chaired by SATOH Ichiro, Professor, the National Institute of Informatics) formulate “Guidebook for Corporate Privacy Governance in the DX Era version 1.0.” This publication summarized what companies should do to build privacy governance. Two updated versions were released with additional specific examples for reference: version 1.1 in July 2021, and version 1.2 in February 2022.
In October 2021, to make this Guidebook more widely available and help companies working on privacy governance move forward with their efforts, METI and MIC released the preliminary report on the questionnaire survey on privacy governance conducted for businesses and consumers. Today, METI and MIC are publishing a report that includes a detailed analysis of the results of the survey and practical examples collected through individual interviews.

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  This questionnaire survey was conducted by the Japan Information Processing Development Corporation (JIPDEC) as part of a project commissioned by METI, i.e., the fiscal 2021 Digital Transaction Environment Development Project (Operation of Privacy-related Survey and Study Group for Data Utilization and Distribution).

2．Results of survey

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  The published material is in Japanese only.

3．FY2021 Corporate Privacy Governance Seminar, jointly held by METI, MIC and JIPDEC

METI and MIC have held corporate privacy governance seminars to disseminate and raise awareness of the Guidebook. In FY2021, the seminar was held four times (with CEATEC on one of these occasions) and was very successful, with a total of about 7,000 persons participating in the seminar.