When developers think about privacy, they often think about legal compliance, consent banners, or policy pages.
But privacy starts much earlier than that, at the API layer.
Every time your backend asks for a phone number, date of birth, location, or optional profile field, you are making a design decision. If you collect too much data by default, you increase risk, reduce trust, and make your system harder to maintain.
The good news is that privacy by design does not have to make your product worse. In many cases, it makes your API cleaner, safer, and easier to reason about.
Why collecting less data matters
