The invention entails identifying the parties involved in a process of handling personally identifiable information; identifying the data involved in said process; classifying the data; expressing each relationship between each pair of said parties in terms of a privacy agreement; and representing the parties, data, and privacy agreements graphically in one or more privacy agreement relationship diagrams. The invention has the advantage of identifying opportunities to reduce privacy-related risks, including identifying unnecessary exchanges of data, for possible elimination, and identifying opportunities to transform data into a less sensitive form. Privacy agreements are based on a limited set of privacy-related actions: access, disclose, release, notify, utilize, update, withdrawConsent, giveConsent, delete, anonymize, depersonalize, and repersonalize. One aspect of the present invention is a method for improving the handling of personally identifiable information. Another aspect of the present invention is a system for executing the method of the present invention. A third aspect of the present invention is as a set of instructions on a computer-usable medium, or resident in a computer system, for executing the method of the present invention.