I Made It Safer by Collecting Less

Sidenote. The most protective thing I did for people's privacy was to throw away information I had already collected.

When I started, Cubby asked for a birthday. It seemed responsible. You want to know who is using the thing, and age feels like basic, harmless information. I built the whole flow around it.

Then I learned something that changed how I think about data entirely. In this space, knowing someone's age is not a harmless little fact. The moment you store it, you have created a responsibility, and in some cases a legal one, that you did not have a second earlier. You now officially "know" something about who your user is, and a whole set of rules and risks attaches to that knowledge. The data you are holding to be careful becomes the very thing you now have to be careful about.

So I did something that felt backwards. I removed birthdays from the app completely. Not hidden, not encrypted, removed. The app no longer asks, no longer stores it, and there is no box in a database somewhere holding a list of ages waiting to leak or be subpoenaed or be misused. You cannot lose what you never kept.

This is the part people miss about privacy. We tend to think of it as a wall: collect whatever you want, then guard it well. But the strongest wall is the one you do not have to build, because the room behind it is empty. Every piece of personal information you collect is something you now have to protect, justify, store safely, and eventually delete. The cheapest and safest version of all of that is to not collect it in the first place.

It changed my default. Now, before the app asks for anything, I ask myself a blunt question: do I actually need this to do the job, or does it just feel responsible to have it? If I do not truly need it, not collecting it is not laziness. It is the most protective choice available.

Cubby ended up knowing less about the people who use it than it easily could have. That was on purpose. In a world where every week brings another story about data getting out, the quiet luxury I can offer is that a lot of it simply does not exist here to get out.

Collecting less is not the weak option. Handled right, it is the strong one.

I write Building in the Open about designing and shipping a real product in public, one honest week at a time.

How I think about building responsibly → aneilrazvi.com/work-with-me.html