For a failed conformance check, a setting that defines the default course of action. The default ruling is set to either "deny," which causes the conformance check to fail regardless of the conformance check results of other governing privacy policies, or to "defer," which indicates that the conformance check failed, but the final result of the compliance check depends on the classification of each governing privacy policy and on the result of the conformance check against each governing privacy policy. See also ruling, compliance check, conformance check.