GDPR Art.25: Data Protection by Design and by Default

Weave data protection into your project management and development lifecycle. Require privacy impact assessments at the design stage of every new system, product, feature, or processing activity. Build privacy checklists and review gates into your project milestones. Make sure product, engineering, and business teams all understand what Article 25 expects of them - this isn't just a DPO concern. Build technical measures that embed privacy principles into your architecture. Pseudonymisation and anonymisation capabilities, privacy-preserving default configurations, granular consent management in the UI, automated data retention and deletion, least-privilege access controls, and data minimisation at the schema and API level. Think about what data you actually need before you design the database, not after. Set every system and product to privacy-protective defaults. Minimum data collection with optional fields clearly marked. Privacy settings at their most restrictive. Profiles set to private. Marketing set to opt-in. Data sharing disabled. Let users loosen these settings if they want to, but make privacy the starting point. Create reusable privacy design patterns for common scenarios - user registration, consent collection, data export, account deletion, age verification. Make them easy for development teams to find and use. Requiring these patterns in relevant projects is far more effective than writing another policy document nobody reads. Document your design decisions for accountability. Record the privacy considerations you assessed at each design stage, what measures you implemented, your rationale, and any trade-offs you weighed. Keep these records alongside your project documentation. Periodically review live systems to confirm that the privacy-by-design measures are actually working as intended.