Open Policy & Advocacy

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Categories: Data

Introducing Lean Data Practices

Jishnu Menon

3 responses

At Mozilla, we believe that users trust products more when companies build in transparency and user control. Earned trust can drive a virtuous cycle of adoption, while conversely, mistrust created by even just a few companies can drive a negative cycle that can damage a whole ecosystem.

Today on International Data Privacy Day, we are happy to announce a new initiative aimed at assisting companies and projects of all sizes to earn trust by staying lean and being smart about collecting and using data.

We call these Lean Data Practices.

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Lean Data Practices in action

Lean Data Practices are not principles, nor are they a way to address legal compliance— rather, they are a framework to help companies think about the decisions they make about data. They do not prescribe a particular outcome and can help even the smallest companies to begin building user trust by fostering transparency and user control.

We have designed Lean Data Practices to be simple and direct:

  1. stay lean by focusing on data you need,
  2. build in security appropriate to the data you have and
  3. engage your users to help them understand how you use their data.

We have even created a toolkit to make it easy to implement them.

We use these practices as a starting point for our own decisions about data at Mozilla. We believe that as more companies and projects use Lean Data Practices, the better they will become at earning trust and, ultimately, the more trusted we will all become as an industry.

Please check them out and help us spread the word!

3 comments on “Introducing Lean Data Practices”

  1. Daniel Maslowski wrote on

    Is this a joke somehow? Are you seriously putting MS office files on GitHub to promote privacy? I wanted to share this within our company, then I looked at the repo and immediately changed my mind.

    1. Jishnu Menon wrote on

      Thanks for the suggestion. We’re updating the repo to add a markdown copy.

  2. Geoff Revill wrote on

    Hi Jishnu

    Excellent post, completely subscribe to the concepts you outline. If you see the Trust Pyramid we build against here http://www.krowdthink.com/privacy.php you’ll see data minimisation as a building block to trust. Our Krowd app fully subscribes to all the principles you outline here.
    In particular we looked at this issue for location data, given its very high sensitivity, and innovated through lean data principles to build a capability to connect people in places without knowing at all where they are or needing mobile location permissions for the app.

    Geoff