Privacy by design in software engineering means building data protection into how a system is specified, coded, tested and run, instead of adding it after launch. Day to day, that means four things: collect only the fields a feature needs, delete data on a schedule, limit which people and services can read it, and block any release that breaks those rules.

What does privacy by design mean for a software engineering team?

For an engineering team, privacy by design means privacy is a set of requirements with tests. It sits alongside latency or uptime, not in a policy document nobody reads.

Ann Cavoukian developed the idea in the 1990s as seven foundational principles . The first two are "proactive not reactive" and "privacy as the default setting".…