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 cheque to fail regardless of the conformance cheque results of other governing privacy policies, or to "defer," which indicates that the conformance cheque failed, but the final result of the compliance cheque depends on the classification of each governing privacy policy and on the result of the conformance cheque against each governing privacy policy. See also ruling, compliance check, conformance check.