The data you don’t keep can’t leak
Every field you collect is something to protect forever. Collect less, keep it shorter, delete on schedule.
Last week was Data Privacy Day, so here’s the cheapest security control I know: don’t keep data you don’t need.
In almost every breach I’ve read about, a big part of the damage was old data. Customers from 2014. ID scans kept “just in case”. Full card numbers in a log file. A copy of production in a test database.
Questions to ask about every form and table:
- Do we need this field at all? Date of birth, national ID, full address. If you can’t say why, don’t ask for it.
- How long do we need it? Set a period, then actually delete or anonymise after it.
- Who needs to see it? Mask it for everyone else.
- Where else does it end up? Logs, backups, exports, emails, test systems.
Data protection laws such as the GDPR already require this. But the real reason is simpler: you can’t lose what you don’t have, and you don’t have to defend it either.
Pick one table this month and set a deletion rule for it. Then the next one.