CDPSE Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A healthcare organization's privacy office is revising its governance charter. The Chief Privacy Officer wants to ensure that the privacy program has the authority to influence decisions about new health data analytics initiatives. Which change to the governance structure would most directly enable this?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Establish a privacy steering committee that includes the Chief Privacy Officer and reports to the board of directors.. To influence decisions, the privacy program needs formal authority and a seat at the strategic table. A privacy steering committee that reports to the board provides that authority and ensures privacy is considered in high-level initiatives like health data analytics. It also facilitates escalation and resource allocation. Other options improve operations or awareness but do not change governance authority. Thus, the steering committee structure is the most direct enabler.

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Increase the privacy team's budget to hire more analysts for handling data subject access requests.

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Delegate privacy decision-making to the analytics department to speed up project approvals.

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Require the privacy team to conduct annual privacy training for all analytics staff.

Question 2

A global retail company is developing a privacy governance framework. The Chief Privacy Officer wants to ensure that privacy requirements are embedded into business processes rather than treated as a standalone compliance activity. Which of the following is the MOST effective approach to achieve this integration?

Accepted Answer

Implement privacy by design principles into the system development lifecycle and business process management.. Embedding privacy by design into the system development lifecycle and business process management ensures that privacy controls are built into operations from the start. This proactive approach makes privacy a default consideration, reducing the need for retroactive fixes and aligning with the objective of integrating privacy into business processes.

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Conduct annual privacy awareness training for all employees.

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Require each department to appoint a privacy champion who reports to the CPO.

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Establish a privacy steering committee that reviews and approves all business process changes.

Question 3

A privacy engineer is designing a customer analytics platform that ingests data from multiple sources. The platform will use Apache Kafka to stream events. To support the principle of data minimization, the engineer wants to ensure that only the fields necessary for analytics are persisted in the data lake. Which Kafka feature should be used to transform and filter records before they are written to the sink?

Accepted Answer

Kafka Streams with a filter and map operation. Kafka Streams enables in-stream processing, allowing the engineer to filter out records and project only necessary fields before the data reaches the sink. This directly implements data minimization by ensuring that only required data is persisted. Other Kafka features like Connect, ACLs, and idempotence do not perform data transformation or filtering.

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Kafka broker topic-level ACLs

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Kafka Connect with a JDBC source connector

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Kafka producer idempotence

Question 4

A privacy engineer is working with a data science team that wants to use a production customer database for developing a churn prediction model. The database contains names, email addresses, and purchase histories. The team proposes to replace names and email addresses with random identifiers and store the mapping in a separate table. Which privacy engineering technique is being applied?

Accepted Answer

Pseudonymization. Pseudonymization is the correct technique because it replaces direct identifiers with pseudonyms while maintaining a separate mapping that allows re-identification. This preserves analytical utility for the data science team while reducing privacy exposure. Anonymization would require irreversible de-identification, and masking typically does not involve a reversible mapping. Tokenization is a specific form of pseudonymization often used for payment data, but the scenario's description of a mapping table aligns with general pseudonymization.

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Anonymization

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Data masking

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Tokenization

Question 5

A CDPSE is assessing the organization's readiness for a data subject access request (DSAR) under the GDPR. The organization processes data in multiple systems, including a CRM, email marketing platform, and HR database. Which TWO steps are essential to ensure timely and complete responses to DSARs? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Establish a process to verify the identity of the requester before releasing data.. To handle DSARs effectively, organizations must track requests centrally to meet deadlines and verify requester identity to prevent unauthorized disclosures. Deleting data, charging fees, or requiring database specifics are non-compliant practices. These two steps are foundational for a defensible DSAR process under GDPR.

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Automatically delete all data upon receiving a DSAR to simplify the process.

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Require the requester to specify the exact database where their data is stored.

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Charge a fee for each DSAR to cover administrative costs.

Question 6

A CDPSE practitioner is tasked with aligning the organization's privacy strategy with business goals. Which of the following activities should be prioritized to ensure that privacy governance is embedded within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?

Accepted Answer

Conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) during the initial requirements gathering phase.. Embedding privacy governance in the SDLC requires action at the earliest phase — requirements gathering — where a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) identifies privacy risks, legal obligations, and design constraints before any development begins. Conducting the PIA during requirements ensures privacy requirements are translated into functional and non-functional specifications, making privacy a built-in property rather than a post-hoc check. This aligns with privacy-by-design and GDPR Article 25 obligations.

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Review the privacy policy after the product has been moved to general availability.

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Perform a penetration test on the production environment after the release deployment.

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Automate data deletion scripts after the data retention period has expired.

Question 7

A company wants to collect geolocation data from mobile users. Which privacy principle should be applied first?

Accepted Answer

Data minimization by requesting access to precise location only when necessary.. Data minimization is the foundational privacy principle that requires collecting only the personal data actually needed for a stated purpose. For geolocation, precise GPS coordinates are highly sensitive and intrusive, so the first question must be whether precise location is even necessary — coarse location or on-demand access may suffice. Applying minimization first reduces the scope of every downstream control (encryption, retention, disclosure), making it the correct starting point.

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Automated archival of location history after one week.

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Publicly disclosing the use of geolocation in the privacy policy.

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Full encryption of geolocation data in transit.

Question 8

Which of the following is an example of a Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) that focuses on data minimization?

Accepted Answer

Synthetic data generation. Synthetic data generation is a Privacy-Enhancing Technology that focuses on data minimization because it creates artificial records that preserve statistical properties of the original dataset without containing any real personal data. This allows organizations to use, share, or analyze data without processing actual personal information, directly supporting the minimization principle. HSMs, AES-256, and vulnerability scanning are security controls, not data minimization PETs.

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Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)

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AES-256 Encryption

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Vulnerability scanning

Question 9

A healthcare organization is establishing a privacy governance program. The board of directors wants to ensure that privacy risks are managed at the highest level. Which of the following is the PRIMARY responsibility of the board in privacy governance?

Accepted Answer

Reviewing and approving the privacy strategy and risk appetite.. The board's primary governance role is to provide strategic direction and oversight, which includes approving the privacy strategy and defining risk appetite. This sets the foundation for the entire privacy program and ensures that privacy is considered at the highest levels of decision-making.

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Developing privacy training materials for employees.

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Managing data subject access requests.

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Conducting privacy impact assessments for new projects.

Question 10

A privacy engineer is implementing a data retention policy for a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The policy requires that customer records be retained for exactly 7 years and then automatically deleted. The CRM vendor offers a built-in retention feature that soft-deletes records after the period, but the records remain recoverable for 30 days. Which action should the engineer take to ensure compliance with the retention policy?

Accepted Answer

Use the built-in retention feature to soft-delete after 7 years, then schedule a separate process to permanently purge soft-deleted records after the 30-day recovery window.. The correct approach combines the vendor's retention feature for initial soft-deletion with a scheduled purge after the recovery window. This ensures permanent deletion at the required time while maintaining a controlled, auditable process. It respects the policy's exact retention period and avoids risky direct database operations or manual interventions.

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Implement a custom script that hard-deletes records from the production database after 7 years, ignoring the vendor's soft-delete feature.

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Extend the retention period to 7 years and 30 days to account for the soft-delete recovery window, then manually delete records via the CRM user interface.

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Configure the built-in retention feature to soft-delete records after 7 years and rely on the vendor's backup expiration to permanently remove data.