Building Software Products with Privacy at the Core: The Future of Technology

Privacy is often an afterthought when developing software, with the feature getting tacked on almost as an afterthought. This results in compromised privacy and a mediocre customer experience. However, privacy must be integrated into the core of every product, making it an essential part of every new release. Developers must prioritize privacy to ensure that customers have control over their data, and data integrity, quality, and control are not compromised. Privacy must become integral to the SDLC, starting with integration early in the process and taking a shift-left approach to creating innovative privacy measures. The seven privacy by design (PbD) principles defined by former Ontario information and privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian can provide developers with guardrails for integrating privacy into their development processes. One of the essential pieces of advice developers should also receive is treating customer data as they would their own family’s data. However, there is no delete button in large language models (LLMs), so once personal identifiable information (PII) becomes part of an LLM, organizations face potential damage. Therefore, organizations that want to integrate privacy must answer five essential questions when implementing privacy engineering. By answering these questions, companies will have a better-than-average chance of protecting data privacy.