Learn how privacy by design and default can enhance user trust, mitigate data breach risks, and create more efficient systems while balancing business needs and customer expectations.
In summary, it reduces the likelihood of data breaches and penalties, protects your business's growth prospects, and satisfies your customers' data privacy requirements.
Yes, you've probably heard that overregulation can stifle data use and hinder business growth—and in many cases, that's absolutely true.
However, a regulatory concept challenges conventional wisdom by introducing a principle that yields significantly more benefits than drawbacks.
Enter privacy by design and privacy by default.
Explore more privacy compliance insights and best practices
By designing your products, services, and processes to require as little data processing as possible, privacy by design adopts a proactive approach to data privacy.
Instead of collecting data "just in case" you might use it later, this approach encourages designing your business to handle only the data absolutely necessary to provide your products or services. It may sound counterintuitive at first, but you’ll see that it’s a win for both privacy and efficiency.
Privacy by default, on the other hand, ensures that personal data is protected automatically, without the user needing to take any action. In practice, this means complying to principles like purpose limitation, data minimization (for instance, in AI), and promptly deleting personal data once it’s no longer needed.
To understand better the differences between the two principles, see the following table:
| Aspect | Privacy by Design | Privacy by Default |
|---|
| Definition | A proactive approach to embedding privacy into the design and development of systems, processes, and products from the outset. | Ensures that personal data is protected automatically by default, without requiring user intervention. | |
| Focus | Design and development phase, emphasizing prevention of privacy risks. | Operational phase, emphasizing the default handling of personal data. | |
| Scope | Broad and strategic—applies to the entire system, from conception to lifecycle management. | Specific and operational—concerns the actual settings and configurations in use. | |
| Examples | 1. Designing a secure encryption system for data transfer. 2. Conducting privacy impact assessments during project development. | 1. Defaulting user profiles to private rather than public. 2. Turning off data tracking by default in an app. | |
| Timing | Starts at the beginning of the system's design or project planning and continues throughout its lifecycle. | Applied at the point of deployment and during operational use of the system. | |
| Legal Basis (GDPR) | Article 25(1): Requires organizations to implement privacy measures during design stages. | Article 25(2): Requires default settings that ensure only necessary personal data is processed. | |
| User Role | Reduces the need for user involvement in protecting their privacy by addressing privacy risks upfront. | Removes the need for users to actively change settings to secure their personal data. | |
| Implementation | System architects, designers, and developers embed privacy-enhancing measures in the structure. | Default configurations and operational processes prioritize data minimization and protection. | |
| Outcome | A system inherently built to respect and protect user privacy. | A system or service that protects privacy in its default state. |
To sum it up:
They complement each other, with Privacy by Design being the strategy and Privacy by Default being its operational guarantee.
You’ve heard that every data processing tool collects as much data as possible, and in many cases it is true. However, there are some examples of privacy by design.
You see? All of these software solutions function effectively, completing tasks without relying on unnecessary data.
Now onto privacy-by-default examples:
You can feel the presence of privacy by design here, too. Once again, it's evident that we can achieve this without accumulating excessive personal data.
The most obvious benefit of privacy by design and default is compliance with the GDPR and other data protection legislation, but let's set that aside for now and discuss the business benefits. These include:
Privacy, whether by design or by default, offers a wonderful side. However, privacy is not without its challenges. There are some arguments against it.
The main argument against privacy by design and by default is that it can stifle innovation by restricting access to personal data that users might not prioritize.
In some cases, this critique holds, especially in data-intensive industries where products excel by leveraging vast amounts of personal information. Take OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example—can you imagine how it would perform if it hadn’t been trained on such extensive data? Would we have the AI capabilities we benefit from today?
We all know the answer.
Aside from innovation constraints, here are a few other cons of privacy by design and default:
Before diving into why privacy by design and default matter for your business, I want to note that you have the freedom to strike a balance between offering users robust privacy features and collecting the data necessary to deliver the services they expect.
Privacy by design and default benefit your business by minimizing the risks of data breaches. Storing personal data makes you a target for malicious actors, creating a risk you should proactively manage. Limiting the collection of personal information not only reduces that risk but also aligns with user expectations and legal requirements under regulations like the GDPR, Saudi PDPL, and other data protection laws.
At the same time, your product must deliver on its promises. If your service depends on personal data, users expect you to collect and process that data responsibly to provide the features they need. This necessity lies outside the scope of privacy by design and default.
Don’t let fear of regulations constrain your innovation. Collect and process data only as necessary for your services, ensure its protection, and refrain from collecting more than necessary—this is the ideal balance.
If you need assistance implementing privacy by design and default in your business, our consultants are here to help. Let us guide you toward a compliant and effective approach.
