The importance of ‘privacy’ has immeasurable ramifications for users of today’s digital age. As tech innovation leads us into 2018, and as we wait in anticipation of self-driven cars, autonomous planes, or intelligent bots using AI and machine learning, the Internet has also awakened to the significance and the criticality of safeguarding personal data, in other words protecting users’ privacy online. For instance, in 2017 there were 1,202 breaches in the 11 months alone, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center. That’s up by 10 percent from the 1,093 breaches recorded during the entirety of 2016. It’s becoming more important for UX consultants and Product Designers to be aware of the ‘Privacy by Design’ (PbD) principles as an essential part of their UCD strategy which is entirely the aim of this article.
These alarming figures of online privacy breaches should drive our collective conscience at influencing authorities to enforce stricter regulations in developing digital data protection standards and making the entire system and practice of data collection safer and transparent, at the same time educating citizens on the practices of safe collection and storage of personally identifiable information and endowing user privacy its due importance because the next data breach could just be an accident that’s waiting to happen. In that regards, measures have been adopted by the European Union (EU) which promulgated a law seeking to protect the collection and export of personally identifiable data thereby giving individuals complete control over data privacy. It’s called the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR which will be enforced by countries across the EU beginning 25 May 2018 although we need to look closely at the foundational principles of PbD.