Also known as: privacy by design · collection limitation
Data minimisation is the principle that an organisation should collect and retain only the personal data actually necessary for a stated purpose, and no more, for no longer than needed.
It is the most reliable privacy control available, because data never collected cannot be breached, subpoenaed, sold, or misused. Every other protection is a mitigation layered over data you chose to hold.
It runs directly against the prevailing instinct to collect everything in case it proves useful later. Minimisation reframes stored personal data as a liability with ongoing carrying cost — regulatory exposure, breach risk, and deletion obligations — rather than a free asset.
GDPR
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the European Union's data protection law, which governs how personal data of people in the EU may be collected and processed, and grants individuals rights over their data regardless of where the processing organisation is based.
Right to Erasure
The right to erasure, commonly called the right to be forgotten, allows individuals to request deletion of their personal data in defined circumstances, such as when it is no longer necessary for the purpose it was collected for or consent has been withdrawn.
Anonymization
Anonymisation is the process of altering data so that individuals can no longer be identified from it, either directly or by combining it with other available information — as distinct from pseudonymisation, which only replaces identifiers with reversible tokens.
Data Protection Impact Assessment
A data protection impact assessment (DPIA) is a structured evaluation of the privacy risks a proposed processing activity poses to individuals, together with the measures planned to mitigate them.
Differential Privacy
Differential privacy is a mathematical framework that adds carefully calibrated statistical noise to data or query results, providing a provable guarantee that the presence or absence of any single individual has negligible effect on the output.