Privacy by Design
Data minimisation, default protection and purpose binding as structural decisions.
6 to work through
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beginner Multiple choice
A food-delivery app of Zomato's shape must refuse alcohol orders to under-18s. The sign-up form asks for a full date of birth and the team is about to store it on the user row alongside the address. What should the account record hold instead, and what does the full date of birth cost you later?
3 min answer -
intermediate
Product wants to add a recommendation feature using browsing history. Legal asks for a data protection impact assessment. What does architecture need to supply?
2 min answer -
advanced
A privacy review finds that a customer's date of birth and partial bank details are visible in session-replay recordings for a subset of users, although the analytics vendor's configuration masks those fields. It affects roughly 3% of sessions, all on one flow. Where do you look, and what does the pattern tell you?
3 min answer -
advanced
On 20 March 2023 a change to OpenAI's servers spiked Redis request cancellations, a redis-py bug returned another user's cached reply on a pooled connection, and chat titles plus payment details of roughly 1.2% of active ChatGPT Plus subscribers were exposed during a nine-hour window. Which design decision turned a client-library bug into a personal-data breach?
3 min answer -
advanced
What does privacy by design mean architecturally rather than as a policy statement, and which decisions must be made first?
2 min answer -
advanced
What does privacy by design mean concretely at the point of designing a system, rather than as a principle?
1 min answer
Neighbouring topics
Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture
General material on designing under legal and regulatory obligation.
Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation
Why you may hold the data, and why that forbids the second use somebody proposed.
Data Subject Rights
Access, correction, portability and erasure across systems that never planned for them.
Consent Architecture
Capturing, versioning and propagating consent to every system that acts on the data.
Data Residency
Keeping data within a jurisdiction, including backups, logs and support access.
Digital Sovereignty
Control over data, operations and the operator, beyond where the bytes physically sit.
Cross-Border Transfer
The legal mechanism that permits data to leave, and the architecture that respects it.
PCI-DSS Scoping
Segmentation and tokenisation to shrink what is in scope, because scope is the cost.
Healthcare Data Protection
PHI handling, minimum necessary access, and audit expectations in clinical systems.
Financial Services Regulation
Operational resilience, payment rules and supervisory expectations as design inputs.
Records Retention & Legal Hold
Keeping what must be kept, deleting what must go, and freezing both on demand.
Erasure vs Immutability
Deletion obligations against event logs, backups and ledgers designed never to forget.
Pseudonymisation
Separating identity from record, and the re-identification risk that remains.
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
Differential privacy, secure enclaves and federated computation, and what each buys.
Regulatory Reporting Pipelines
Submissions with fixed deadlines, fixed formats, and a regulator who audits the lineage.
Sector Cloud Rules
Regulator expectations for cloud use, exit plans and material outsourcing notification.
Exit & Concentration Risk
Being able to leave a provider, and what the regulator asks when you cannot.
Third-Party Risk
Assessing, contracting and monitoring the vendors your architecture now depends on.
Geo-Restriction & Sanctions
Blocking access by jurisdiction, and the accuracy and evasion problems that come with it.