Privacy and data protection

Not legal advice. Regimes differ by jurisdiction and change; material questions need qualified counsel. This structures the assessment and identifies what to escalate.

Start from the data map

You cannot assess what you have not inventoried. For each category of personal data:

• What is collected, from whom, and where it came from.
• Why — the specific purpose, and the lawful basis where one is required.
• Where it lives, who can reach it, and which vendors receive it.
• How long it is kept, and what deletes it. "Indefinitely" is a finding, not an answer.
• Whether it crosses a border, and under what mechanism.

Most privacy failures are inventory failures: data nobody remembered was being collected, in a system nobody owned.

Design decisions that prevent problems

• Collect less. Every field is a liability with a maintenance cost. The cheapest way to protect data is not to hold it.
• Purpose limitation is real. Data collected for one purpose is not automatically available for another — particularly for training models, which is where this most often goes wrong now.
• Separate identifiers from behavior where analysis does not require linkage.
• Retention with an enforcing mechanism. A policy with no deletion job is a statement of intent.

Consent, where it applies

Specific, informed, freely given, and as easy to withdraw as to give. Pre-ticked boxes, bundled consent, and cookie walls that offer no genuine choice fail on their face in the regimes that require consent.

Note that consent is one lawful basis among several and often the weakest — it can be withdrawn, and then the processing must stop.

Vendors

Any third party processing personal data on your behalf needs a written agreement covering purpose, security, sub-processors, deletion, and assistance with subject rights. Sending data to a vendor without one is a common and easily avoided violation.

Assess the vendor's actual security, not their questionnaire answers, in proportion to the sensitivity of what they will hold.

Subject rights and breaches

Have a working process before the first request: how it arrives, how identity is verified, how the data is located across systems, and the deadline. Locating the data is the part that fails.

For breaches, know your notification clock before you need it — several regimes measure it in hours from awareness. Decide in advance who determines that awareness has occurred.

Never

• Collect data because it may be useful later. Purpose first, then collection.
• Retain personal data past the period you published.
• Send personal data to a vendor before the contract terms and the transfer basis are in place.
• Load production personal data into a test environment.