Lean Data Practices: Helping Businesses and Developers be more Privacy Aware
Data Privacy Day is just around the corner. If you are a business or developer that handles user data, you should always be working to create a more trusted relationship with your users around their data.
Building trust with your users around their data doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does mean that you need to think about user privacy and security in every aspect of your product.
That’s why, last year, we introduced the first version of our Lean Data Practices to help any developer or company start to think holistically about the decisions they make with their data. Lean Data Practices can help even the smallest companies to begin building user trust by fostering transparency and user control.
Lean Data Practices are simple (and even come with a toolkit to make them easy to implement):
1. stay lean by focusing on data you need,
2. build in security appropriate to the data you have and
3. engage your users to help them understand how you use their data.
We use these Lean Data Practices as a starting point for all of our decisions about data along with our Data Privacy Principles. We do this because, at Mozilla, we strive to be both trusted and trustworthy. Mistrust created by even just a few companies can drive a negative cycle that can damage a whole ecosystem. We believe that as more companies and projects use Lean Data Practices, the better they will become at earning trust and, ultimately, the more trusted we will all become as an industry.
Based on all the great interest and feedback we’ve received in this past year, we’re working on new modules that help customize the Lean Data Practices for marketers, non-profits and more that we’ll share later this year.
This article is cross-posted from Mozilla’s Net Policy Blog.