Design
Privacy is a design choice.
Someone has trusted us with their information. What happens next?
If someone sends us their information, they’re trusting us to look after it. We don’t stop being responsible for it because the form works and the feature has shipped.
That’s where privacy starts for me. Why are we asking for this? What are we going to do with it? Who’s going to look after it? I’d like us to have those answers before we start collecting anything.
Where does it go?
Take a contact form. Someone types a message and presses send. They probably expect it to reach an inbox. They may not expect copies in notifications, logs or backups.
And the message could contain something sensitive we never asked for. People don’t always write neatly within the boundaries we imagined when we designed the form.
Every copy is another place where that information needs looking after. Who can read it? How long does it stay? What happens when it’s no longer needed? Those are part of building the feature too.
Could we explain the choice?
Sometimes we need information to do something useful. Sometimes we ask for it because that’s what the form has always asked for. It’s worth knowing which situation we’re in.
I want to understand what the person gets from sharing it, whether we could do the same thing without it, and how we’ll explain what happens next.
We can change a design before it goes live. Once someone’s information is in our systems, we already have a responsibility to them.