Combined Privacy Management release notes for upgrades from Xanadu to Australia

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated June 16, 2026
  • 15 minutes to read
  • Consolidated page of all release notes for Privacy Management from Xanadu to Australia.

    How to use this page

    To help you prepare for your upgrade, we have combined the cross-family Privacy Management release notes onto one page. Read this summary of the new features, changes, and updated information for your product from Xanadu to Australia.

    Tip:
    If there were no updates for a release notes section in a certain family release, we included a short note for your reference. For example, if a product did not have any updates in Tokyo, the row says "No updates for this release."

    Important information for upgrading Privacy Management to Australia

    Before you upgrade to Australia, review these pre- and post-upgrade tasks and complete the tasks as needed.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    New features

    Between your current release family and Australia, new features were introduced for Privacy Management.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    Personal Data Rights
    Use the Personal Data Rights application that provides configurable workflows to manage and automate personal data rights requests efficiently, reducing the risk of non-compliance. The Personal Data Rights application enables customers to efficiently manage and fulfill Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), consumer rights requests, and so on, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. The application helps organizations to handle requests related to the personal data rights of their consumers while ensuring that employees can maintain data protection standards globally.
    Create data lineage
    Establish a data lineage to understand how data is being consumed and shared in a given processing activity. Creating a data lineage also helps you to understand and manage the associated risks for the data being shared. This feature provides a visual representation of data lineage or hierarchy.
    Create a regulatory agency
    Create regulatory agencies in the Privacy Workspace to identify the relevant regulatory authorities that are responsible for overseeing the businesses in the public interest. The centralized library consolidates all regulatory communication via emails.
    Collaborate and chat with cross-functional teams for processing activities, privacy cases, privacy assessments, and personal data rights requests
    Initiate quick discussions with key stakeholders while working on a processing activity, privacy case, or a personal data rights request. The chat feature is integrated with Microsoft Teams and a group is automatically created on Microsoft Teams when a discussion is initiated. The chat conversations that take place using the Discuss button are stored in the respective record making it simpler for the privacy teams to refer to them when working on a task.
    View smart attestations on the processing activities
    Use the Smart Assessment Engine feature to respond to attestations. View the reports of the new control attestations on the landing pages of the privacy analyst and the privacy manager. Utilize the filter in the Attestations report to select if you want to view the classic attestations or the new attestations.
    Changes in roles with the Privacy Employee user application
    Note:
    Only applicable to the customers with the GRC Privacy Employee User application (sn_privacy_emp) installed.
    When you install the new GRC Privacy Employee User application and assign the sn_privacy_emp.privacy_employee role to your employees, the role enables your employees to perform the following operations from the Employee Center:
    • Proactively request privacy impact assessments (PIAs) for new implementations, applications, and processes from the Employee Center.
    • Report privacy cases related to data privacy policy and regulatory violations.
    • Read and acknowledge organizational privacy policies.
    • Create policy exceptions.
    • Create privacy issues.
    Changes in roles with the GRC: Privacy Lite User application
    If the GRC: Privacy Lite User application (sn_privacy_lite) is installed, the following roles are considered as lite operators:
    • sn_privacy.business_user
    • sn_privacy.assessment_responder
    • sn_privacy_case.privacy_case_business_user
    • sn_grc_pdr.data_owner_admin

    Users with the lite operator role can do the following:

    • Respond to privacy assessment tasks as business users.
    • Respond to the processing activity's criticality risk assessments and object-based assessment.
    • View, update, and close assigned issues.
    • Respond to the assigned control attestations.
    • Respond to the assigned manual indicator tasks.
    • Create, update, and close assigned remediation tasks.
    • Work on the processing activity as a business user when it’s assigned to you to collect the required details.
    • Work on breach assessments and other privacy case tasks.
    • Respond to the detailed privacy risk assessments on each risk identified on a processing activity.
    • Respond to the assessment and investigation tasks assigned by the privacy team.
    • Work on personal data rights action tasks to handle data according to the requester's requests.

    Yokohama

    [Placeholder link text to key bundle-grc.configure-criticality-factors]
    Leverage criticality factors to evaluate the initial risks associated with processing activities. Integrate these factors into privacy assessments and automatically generate a criticality score upon assessment approval. These factors are also added to processing activities, enabling you to make updates at any time. Integrating these factors in a privacy assessment eliminates the need for a separate criticality assessment. This consolidation reduces the workload for the privacy teams.
    Smart assessments
    Use the new and improved assessment experience that enables:
    • capturing the data elements, the information object attributes, hierarchies
    • building the assessment questionnaire
    This new experience enables responders to update all the necessary details within the assessments, eliminating the need to update the processing activity separately.
    Configure categories
    Implement Information object categories to tag and classify information objects effectively. For example, attributes like iris scans and fingerprints are often referred to as biometric data, or email addresses and phone numbers can be tagged as contact information. Information object categories enable you to categorize these information objects under these broader classifications. This approach is useful in the following ways:
    • Enhances compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and so on by accurately capturing and tracking required data categories.
    • Improves clarity for business users, ensuring they can easily identify and work with terms they’re familiar with while adhering to regulatory standards.
    • Streamlines data governance by creating a structured framework that supports both regulatory needs and business operations.
    Smart assessment for privacy case management action tasks
    Use the new assessment experience of Smart Assessment Engine for privacy case action tasks. Only when an action task moves from the Draft to the Assigned state, the assessment can be sent. To use the smart assessment, a new property called enable_smart_assessments (sn_grc_case_mgmt.enable_smart_assessments) is introduced with the default value as true.

    Zurich

    Data subjects
    Select and define the multiple data subject types for each processing activity. You can capture the volume of data subjects that were processed, the specific data elements that were collected from the users, and the user locations. With this feature, you get a realistic, granular, and scalable representation of your processing activities.
    Privacy management dashboard
    Get an overview of your complete privacy risk and compliance posture from the Privacy Management dashboard so that you can quickly prioritize and remediate your processing activities. By looking at the Processing Activities, Risk & Compliance, and Operations & Case management sections, you can see the overall compliance score, trends, privacy criticality assessment scores, and risk heatmap. From the dashboard, you can also see information about the global legal framework to understand the regional obligations and the built-in risk metrics that automatically assess each processing activity.
    New screening and PIA templates
    Use the new Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) and Screening Assessment templates that provide standardized questions, evaluation criteria, and workflows so that you can perform a processing activity criticality and privacy risk assessment. With these new templates, you can ensure consistency, reduce manual effort, and support compliance with regulatory and organizational requirements.

    Australia

    [Placeholder link text to key configure-pdr-ext-form]
    • Starting from version 22.3.x of Personal Data Rights, privacy administrators can navigate to External form configuration to tailor the public-facing PDR form for their organization. They can map jurisdictions to data subject types and request types, and specify whether an authorized agent can submit a request on behalf of a data subject for each jurisdiction.
    • For each jurisdiction, administrators can add terms and conditions, disclaimers, and guidance text that requesters see when they submit a request from that jurisdiction.
    • Administrators can also show or hide form fields based on the combination of jurisdiction, data subject type, and request type that a requester selects. The form collects only the information needed, therefore, requesters see only the fields that apply to their request.
    [Placeholder link text to key add-stakeholders-to-a-pa]
    • Starting from version 22.3.x of Privacy Management, privacy analysts can add any user, including users without privacy roles, as a key stakeholder on a processing activity. Such users are set to No privilege to respond to assessments by default, and therefore, can only view the record if they are granted the business user role.
    • Key stakeholders with the appropriate business user role can select Request edit access to ask the privacy analyst for editing rights to a processing activity.
    New privacy content in Privacy Management Content
    • Starting from version 22.3.x of Privacy Management Content, privacy managers can extend their regulatory library with new ready-to-use authority documents, Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDPA), Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, and Colorado Privacy Act. When activating an authority document, they can select which citations to add to the library, and then select from the AI-generated control objectives already mapped to those citations.
    • Privacy Management Content also ships an updated version of privacy risk statement that carries forward the AI-generated risk statements from the previous version and adds new ones. Reinstalling the already existing risk statements after the update may overwrite certain changes made to them.
    Smart assessment versioning of privacy assessment templates
    Starting from version 22.3.x of Privacy Management and Privacy Case Management, you can create a version of an existing privacy assessment template to revise the questionnaire, response options, or automations without disrupting assessments that are already in progress. New privacy assessments use the latest published version of the template.
    Early availability
    Case summarization for privacy cases
    Privacy analysts can now use the Now Assist case summarization feature to quickly understand a privacy case without manually reviewing every field or related list. Now Assist analyzes key case attributes, such as timelines, impacted areas, evidence, and actions, and generates a structured summary directly inside the privacy case. This feature solves a common problem: case data is often lengthy, scattered across multiple related lists, and difficult for analysts to digest efficiently. Analysts can also save and edit summaries as case data evolves, ensuring the record stays current.
    Report a privacy case anonymously
    Employees can now use the Anonymous Reporting Center to report privacy violations such as data breaches or exposure, unauthorized data use, privacy law violations (GDPR, CCPA), or other privacy-by-design lapses without revealing their identity or location.
    Accessed through the Employee Center, the Anonymous Reporting Center portal automatically logs users out to enforce anonymity, creates case records without mapping to employee identity, and provides a unique report key for secure follow-up communication.
    Reports are routed to the appropriate compliance team based on the nature of the concern. Throughout the investigation process:
    • Investigators can request additional information through a comments system visible to the reporter
    • Reporters can follow up on their case using their report key to check progress and respond to questions
    • All interactions maintain reporter anonymity at every step; no identity or location data is ever captured or linked
    This enhancement enables organizations to build trust, mitigate risks before escalation, and ensures regulatory compliance with whistleblower protection requirements.
    Hierarchy and lineage enhancements
    The Hierarchy and lineage enhancements enables privacy teams to identify which systems, vendors, and applications belong to a specific processing activity by marking relationships as “part of a processing activity.” This ability differentiates scoped components from global or shared connections. Users can toggle between a processing‑activity‑scoped view and a full lineage view, helping them understand data flows in the appropriate context.
    Privacy content accelerator
    The privacy regulatory content through Unified Content Management provides pre‑built authority documents, citations, control objectives, and risk statements aligned with major privacy frameworks, including GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and the NIST Privacy Framework 1.0. These resources are available for download directly from the Privacy Workspace, enabling teams to readily access standardized regulatory content.

    Changes

    Between your current release family and Australia, some changes were made to existing Privacy Management features.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    Tagging of information object tags
    Use the Data classification field to tag information objects instead of using the tag icon.
    Initiating privacy assessment
    When you initiate a privacy assessment from either an entity or a processing activity, you’re no longer redirected to the Create new privacy assessment form, instead, a new pop-up window appears where you can specify all the assessment details.

    Zurich

    Zurich Patch 4
    Zurich Patch 1
    Processing activity tab
    The revamped Processing Activity overview page provides a unified dashboard that displays key compliance and risk metrics, such as risk scores, compliance scores, and criticality scores. This update makes it easier for privacy managers and analysts to assess the status of each processing activity, track open issues, and prioritize actions.
    Layout for processing activity record view
    The vertical layout of a processing activity enables you to see the information in a top-down linear flow. With this layout, you can see the sequential representation of a data processing workflow.
    Privacy management home page
    The enhanced Privacy Management home page now has dedicated tabs for Processing Activity, Risk and compliance, Operations, and Privacy Cases. This updated layout helps to improve readability by organizing your reports into clearly defined sections.

    Australia

    Australia Patch 1
    ServiceNow product tiers
    The ServiceNow AI Platform now brings you a new AI experience with three licensing tiers available:
    • Foundation: AI basics to deliver insights
    • Advanced: AI to boost productivity across relevant use cases
    • Prime: Act autonomously with all AI assets and create your own

    Depending on your entitlements, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents.

    Removed

    Between your current release family and Australia, some Privacy Management features or functionality were removed.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Deprecations

    Between your current release family and Australia, some Privacy Management features or functionality were deprecated.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Activation information

    Review information on how to activate Privacy Management.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    Install Privacy Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

    Yokohama

    Install Privacy Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

    Zurich

    Install Privacy Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store.

    Australia

    Install Privacy Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store.

    Additional requirements

    If any additional requirements were introduced or changed for Privacy Management we have noted them here.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Browser requirements

    If any specific browser requirements were introduced or changed for Privacy Management we have noted them here.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Accessibility information

    Review details on accessibility information for Privacy Management, such as specific requirements or compliance levels.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Localization information

    If there are specific localization considerations for Privacy Management we have noted them here.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    No updates for this release.

    Yokohama

    No updates for this release.

    Zurich

    No updates for this release.

    Australia

    No updates for this release.

    Highlight information

    If there are specific highlight considerations for Privacy Management we have noted them here.

    Release Release notes

    Xanadu

    • Use the Personal Data Rights application to manage personal data rights requests from your customers or consumers, and employees in compliance with global privacy regulations.
    • Establish a data lineage to visualize data consumption, sharing, and the associated risks for a processing activity.
    • Use the Smart Assessment Engine to respond to and view new control attestations related to your processing activity.
    • Create a regulatory agency library to store and access regulatory details, including correspondence with the regulators.
    • Initiate chats from privacy assessments, processing activities, privacy cases, and personal data rights requests to collaborate with various teams to ensure quick responses.

    See Explore for more information.

    Yokohama

    • Integrate criticality factors into assessments and processing activities thereby simplifying the assessment process, and reducing the workload for privacy teams.
    • Use the Smart Assessment Engine to capture details regarding information objects and hierarchies, updating all details within the assessments and eliminating the need to separately update processing activities.
    • Implement information Object (IO) categories such as biometric data, to align with regulatory classifications and bridge the gap between requirements and user understanding.
    • Empower privacy case analysts to perform assessments on privacy cases using the Smart Assessment Engine

    See Privacy Management for more information.

    Zurich

    • A new external Personal data rights (PDR) request form enables customers, ex-employees, and third parties to submit PDR requests from a website with email verification.
    • Access Control by Legal Entity feature enables teams to access only processing activities relevant to their legal entity, maintaining privacy by design principle.
    • Now Assist for Privacy Management plugin uses Generative AI to streamline privacy workflows by summarizing assessments, condensing issues, and merging control objectives.
    • Reporting privacy incidents through email feature enables employees to report privacy incidents directly through email.
    • Impacted and related areas configuration allows privacy case managers to add custom business area types to privacy cases for better context.
    • Revamped Processing Activity overview page provides a unified dashboard showing key compliance and risk metrics for processing activities.

    See Privacy Management for more information.

    Australia

    • Configure the Personal Data Rights (PDR) external-facing form to map jurisdictions to data subject types and request types, and control whether an authorized agent can submit a request on behalf of a data subject.
    • Enable key stakeholders to view and update processing activities that they own directly from GRC tasks in the Employee Center.
    • Activate new ready-to-use privacy content, including risk statements and authority documents, such as Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDPA), the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, and the Colorado Privacy Act.
    • Automatically generate an AI-recommended privacy case summary from varied compliance case data, reducing investigation time and enabling faster, more consistent decision-making.
    • Anonymously report compliance violations through a secure portal that maintains complete identity protection while enabling organizational trust and regulatory compliance.

    See Privacy Management for more information.