Service-Provision, Quality, Access and Equity

Where a project entails certain types of risks in addition to privacy (such as quality, access and equity), an organisation may consider addressing multiple social impacts within a single process, rather than conducting an impact assessment focused solely on privacy. This is only one example of how the PIA can be integrated with other existing or necessary processes to achieve efficiency.

Commitment to customer-service is fundamental to the activities of business and government alike. In the public sector, the statutes under which the agency or programme operates may include provisions that require the delivery of particular services, or that achieve the same effect because they require the agency to perform particular functions.

Expectations of quality exist in relation to services, as they do for physical goods.

There may also be expectations about the accessibility of the service. This applies geographically (across urban, regional, rural and remote areas), and over time (business hours, after-hours, weekends or around-the-clock). There may also be expectations that services be available through a range of communications channels (physical locations, telephone, over the Internet).

An aspect of accessibility that attracts particular attention is equity. Some forms of equity are statutorily enforced, in that discrimination on certain grounds is illegal, whereas other aspects are matters of public policy. Bases on which discrimination and equity issues might arise include:

• physical disabilities (e.g. of sight, mobility, or capacity to use a keyboard or mouse)
• mental disabilities (e.g. the inability to remember a username/password pair, or to remember to carry a token)
• educational disabilities (e.g. lack of understanding of username/password prompts, or what to do with a token)
• lingual disabilities (e.g. insufficient English to understand instructions, perhaps even the instructions on how to contact an interpreter)
• location (e.g. in an institution, in a remote area, in a rural or regional area with outdated infrastructure or inadequate bandwidth, or in a foreign country)
• lifestyle (e.g. itinerants, 'street-kids')