EvidenceSheet
SOC 2 (2017 Trust Services Criteria) · P - Privacy

P4.1 Limiting use to identified purposes

The privacy objectives name purposes, and personal information is put to no use beyond them. Points of focus: personal information serves only the purposes it was collected for and only with implicit or explicit consent, unless law requires otherwise.

Source: SOC 2 (2017 Trust Services Criteria), P4.1. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open SOC 2 (2017 Trust Services Criteria) in the compliance library.

These are criteria, not controls: you design controls that meet them, and which criteria are in scope follows the categories your report covers (Security always; Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity and Privacy only if chosen). A Type 2 report tests that the controls operated across the period, so the evidence asked for is samples across that period, not one copy.

3
artefacts
0
held by a system
2
at each review
hard
to go live
Document repository
where the evidence lives
teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

  • Records of processing mapping data to purposes · Document repository
  • Privacy review or impact assessment before new uses · Data governance / DLP tooling

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

  • Access controls restricting use to authorised purposes · Document repository

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

P3.2 Explicit consent before collecting information that requires it · P4.2 Retaining personal information