Handling Customer Data Securely
Good practices for protecting customer data
Handling customer data securely covers everything from how it's collected to how it's stored, shared and finally deleted, always applying the principle of collecting only the information the business really needs. This matters in practice because every extra piece of data stored without a clear purpose is an additional risk the company takes on without getting any benefit in return, and in the event of a leak, that surplus data only increases the damage and possible penalties. A common example is when a product team keeps a customer's complete address history "just in case it's needed later", when in reality only the current address is used, creating a database that's unnecessarily attractive to any attacker who manages to access it.