Privacy by Design

An approach to system design that embeds privacy protections into the architecture from the beginning rather than adding them later. The seven foundational principles (proactive, default settings, embedded, positive-sum, end-to-end, visible, user-centric) were developed by Ann Cavoukian and are now codified in GDPR Article 25. In practice, this means data minimization, purpose limitation, and access controls built into the data model -- not layered on top.