Data privacy best practices: Tactical and strategic level
You can hide a $10 bill from unauthorized access. But when you need to store and manage $100,000, controlling each $10 bill becomes harder.
In data privacy best practices terms, you will need to choose among several types of measures to keep the whole sum safe.
First, you may decide to keep all those $10 bills together in one place. In this case, you increase their visibility and, thus, the risk of unauthorized access. To protect your money, you’ll need to hire a guard, get security cameras, build high fences, and invest in other protective measures while dealing with privacy and security issues.
Alternatively, you can design a data privacy security system with diversified denominations and different storage places for your $100,000 sum. Here, you’ll face the challenge of managing data protection in all these separate sources, but getting the complete $100,000 from you will become much harder.
Managing your personal data is just like choosing how to manage that big sum of money. You need to understand what the sensitivity levels of your personal information are. Then, you can diversify the risks and launch accurate data privacy practices to protect it from unauthorized access.
This guide will show how to choose and apply the most relevant data privacy best practices for your personal information.
What are data privacy and data security practices?
User data protection is achieved through data privacy and data security practices. While data security focuses on maintaining measures that safeguard sensitive information from unauthorized attacks, data privacy is a more complex term that governs how data is collected, shared, and used.
In simpler words, data security asks, ‘How to protect data?’, while data privacy asks, ‘Why do we have this data, and is how we protect it appropriate?’.
Together, data privacy and data security practices are guidelines and measures that ensure managing sensitive data as a strategic business asset and protect personal identifiable information (PII) with the best tactics.
Data privacy best practices: Why protecting user data matters in 2025
Each time we go online, we leave a growing digital trace. Be it the greater number of personal photos on your cloud storage or more detailed corporate data in your scaling business, the biggest sensitive information challenge is that it constantly increases in volume.
Due to its size, it’s getting harder to protect data privacy from corruption, data breaches, and other types of unauthorized access. It’s just too much data, and it increases every day.
That’s why you need to be clear about what information you store and how you protect it. Then, depending on your circumstances and tech abilities, you can apply different data privacy best practices to secure all your sensitive data.
Important compliance laws and regulations for data privacy best practices
For the data privacy guidance, several key compliance laws and regulations establish the legal basis for modern data protection architecture. Here are some of them:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to any organization processing EU residents’ data,
- California Privacy Rights Act (CCPA) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) protect the consumer rights of California residents,
- EU Data Act protects the Internet of Things (IoT) data privacy of EU residents,
- Brazil’s LGPD serves as a Brazilian analog of GDPR with local elements, and
- Canada’s PIPEDA is the act for personal information protection in Canada.
These compliance regulations establish the foundation for transparency, data minimization, and storage limitation, and serve as the basis for data privacy best practices described below.
Data security and privacy best practices: Active tech measures
Among the data privacy best practices you can implement on the technology level, you can rely on minimizing data collection, improving storage security, and getting privacy-first security software.
Minimize data collection for managing data protection
Data minimization is the practice of collecting, processing, and storing the minimal amount of personal information for any specific purpose. Among all the data privacy best practices, it is one of the quickest fixes a company can do to reduce risks and improve compliance.
Data anonymization, or erasing identifiers on personal information, is one of the ways to achieve data minimization. Also, as the key security and privacy policy recommendations, consider:
- Being vigilant regarding sensitive data
- Avoiding the practice of keeping extra data “just to check our future hypotheses”
- Embedding storage limitations into the design of systems and processes in a company
In data-driven companies, it’s always tempting to collect as much information about users as possible. Some believe it’s better to have strong data to experiment and iterate.
But this practice increases the occurrence of data privacy problems. So, a more sustainable approach is to stabilize the risk by collecting only the necessary and compliant information.
How to ensure data security and storage protection
In addition to limiting the amount of data collected, improving the storage limitation, or the way it’s managed, is also among data privacy best practices. You should build a system that collects just enough data, stores it for a minimal period, and then deletes, destroys, or anonymizes it.
The most common data security and storage protection practices include:
- Encrypting data both at rest and in transit
- Letting only authorized users access the data
- Linking deleting personal data with the action of changing an account status to ‘inactive’
Cleansing the data after it’s no longer necessary is among the key GDPR and CCPA requirements.
Ensure compliance with data privacy-first technology
Data privacy management software is a data privacy practice that helps with keeping regulatory responsibilities for managing sensitive data. The decision to get privacy-first software facilitates automating compliance, building trust, and reducing legal risks.
Among the range of privacy-first technology types, consider these tools to stay compliant and efficient:
- Consent management platform for automated consent collection and blocking.
- Server-side tagging for moving data processing from the user’s browser to a secure server that ensures better data accuracy, control, and compliance.
- Advanced Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for data anonymization, encryption, and access control privacy management tools.
You can get the tech solution that assists with each separate data privacy function — or invest in data privacy-first technologies like Usercentrics to comply with compliance regulations on all levels of protecting sensitive information.
Security and privacy policy recommendations: Strategic improvements
Perceiving data privacy strategically is seeing it as a trust-building and compliance-ensuring measure that prevents your business from making costly mistakes. These data privacy best practices will help you integrate data protection in your business operations.
Protecting data privacy by design
With a privacy by design approach, you build the system that considers personal data protection from the development stages, not while reactively dealing with the data privacy problems.
In practice, data privacy by design includes these regular practices:
- Assessing data privacy risks before launching any initiatives
- Conducting regular training for data privacy and security
- Having an incident response plan developed and available
- Setting default settings to privacy-friendly options
- Getting consent management at the core of business
With data privacy by design measures, you embed privacy protections proactively and cover all the vulnerabilities that may lead to the data privacy problems.
Managing data protection by building a privacy-aware corporate culture
Transparency and purpose limitation are the foundation of ethical data practices. Thus, a key proactive user data protection practice is to ensure that each business unit understands why collecting only absolutely necessary data for legitimate purposes only is the only way.
Making data privacy awareness part of a corporate culture means that each employee understands how data privacy works and what their role is in protecting user data privacy. Here is how you can do it:
- Conduct regular training on data privacy and data compliance standards
- Add a data privacy slide to the onboarding flow
- Conduct regular privacy and security audits and react to the possible problems
- Launch regular discussions and open talks on data privacy to keep the topic up-to-date and shared
- Optional: for extra motivation, you can nominate privacy champions in each team to undermine its importance.
With these measures, you’re building data privacy as a strategic function within an organization. Ideally, it will mean that all the teams think as user advocates and protect building sustainable relationships with them.
How to ensure data protection by giving users control
Making consent and policy clear before collecting the data is about empowering users. They can make informed decisions and actively participate in protecting their sensitive data.
However, simply letting people manage their own data privacy is not enough for tis measure. You need to work on your communication and processes to make it work:
- Make it easy for them to see their privacy settings and understand what they can do with them
- Simplify the legal language of a privacy policy so users can fully embrace their data control
- Add granular consent options with clear types of consent described and understandable permissions given
Allowing people manage their data is a good practice. Even though these measures require extra effort and thought leadership, they contribute to building transparency and trust between service providers and their users.
Implementing data protection best practices: What’s next?
Introducing data privacy and data security practices may seem costly, but the potential business losses from severe violations can reach up to EU 20 million in GDPR penalties only.
Getting a data privacy-first technology from Usercentrics is more cost-effective in comparison. It can help you build the privacy by design that fixes current data security problems, maintains data privacy compliance, and contributes to building trust with your audience.
You can choose one tech solution among several data privacy best practices at a time. Alternatively, you can make a strategic decision to start investing in privacy by design to protect all your sensitive information.
Each of these measures will contribute to creating a conducive environment where each piece of data, be that a bill in your $100,000 sum or a detail of your personal information, is safely protected.