# A Perfect Match: Converging and Automating Privacy and Security Impact Assessment On-the-Fly
## 4 APSIA Conceptual Architecture and Building Blocks
### Data types
#### 4.3.3 Privacy Scores of Processing Activities  
Given the methodology steps described in Section 3 and the privacy impact scoring of Section 4.3, one can infer that based on the inderdependencies of the tangible and intangible assets of an organisation, a vulnerable asset may trigger a privacy threat. Thus, the privacy scoring formula given in Equation (1) is calculated per vulnerability and per asset. Hence, the scoring approach produces as many privacy scores as the existing vulnerabilities on the assets. This is reasonable, as each vulnerability may trigger a different privacy impact. Having said that, overall we define 3 different types of scores:  
* the asset-level privacy score (APS)
* the processing activity-level privacy score (PAPS)
* the organisation-level (global) privacy score (OPS)  
All three scores range between 0 and 10. The corresponding qualitative value is mapped to a 5-tier scale values ranging from \"Very Low\" to \"Very High\", as can be seen in Table 5.  
Asset-level privacy privacy score (APS): An asset-level privacy score is assigned to each asset, associated with a vulnerability, following the scoring system presented in Section 4.3. It must be noted that in the case where an asset is affected by multiple vulnerabilities, the highest value (max) among the Asset-level privacy scores will be assigned to the asset. The privacy score is calculated following Equation (1). Processing activity-level privacy score (PAPS): Each processing activity is represented as a chain of interrelated assets (supporting assets). Thus, the highest Asset-level privacy score among the assets of the processing activity represents the privacy risk of the activity. For instance, the privacy score assigned to the Processing Activity \(i\) that contains \(n\) assets in its asset chain is calculated based on the following formula:  
\[PAPS_{i}=max(APS_{1},APS_{2},\ldots APS_{n}) \tag{4}\]  
Organisation-level (Global) privacy score (OPS): The global privacy score is the highest Asset-level privacy score among all the ICT assets of the infrastructure of the organisation. Thus, the highest Asset-level privacy score among the assets of the organisation, and in turn among all the processing activities, represents the global privacy score of an organisation. For instance, the privacy score assigned to the organisation that contains \(k\) assets in its infrastructure is formalised as follows:  
\[OPS=max(APS_{1},APS_{2},\ldots APS_{k}) \tag{5}\] \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Data Type** & **Value** \\ \hline Sensitive Personal Data & 1.5 \\ Personal Data & 1.0 \\ Financial Data & 0.75 \\ Operational Data & 0.5 \\ Other Data & 0 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 4: Data Type values. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Privacy Score Range** & **Qualitative Value** \\ \hline
0.0–2.0 & Very Low \\
2.0–4.0 & Low \\
4.0–6.0 & Medium \\
6.0–8.0 & High \\
8.0–10 & Very High \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Five-tier scale values for privacy score. The selection of the highest score to be represented in the APS, PAPS and OPS scores aims to simplify the assessment process, especially in the cases where a great number of assets and processing activities is engaged in an organisation. In addition, this quick view can be beneficial in cases where the lifecycle of the methodology described in Section 3, is triggered periodically or upon the detection of events that can trigger the assessment process in a dynamic manner (e.g., detection of new vulnerability, new asset entry in a processing activity, new device in the topology). However, in order not to miss the holistic view of the threats and their corresponding risks, in case where multiple risks exist for an assets, a histogram is generated to complement the analysis and represent the distributional characteristics of the risks for the assets. In this way, the histogram balances the narrow view of focusing solely to most severe privacy impact.