Unit VI · People and rules
Personal data: collect less, say what you do
Every email address and name your app stores is a responsibility. The simplest protection is data you never collected.
Five habits from the FTC
The Federal Trade Commission's guide for businesses sums it up in five principles: take stock (know what personal information you have), scale down (keep only what you need), lock it (protect what you keep), pitch it (properly dispose of what you no longer need) and plan ahead (know what you will do if something goes wrong).
Say what you actually do
Your privacy notice must match what the app does. The FTC takes enforcement action against companies that do not live up to their privacy promises or that mislead people about how they protect personal information. If the AI wrote your privacy page, check every sentence against the code: what is collected, why, who receives it, and how long it is kept.
If data leaks
All 50 US states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have laws requiring that people be told when certain personal information about them is breached. Knowing what you hold, and where, is the first thing you will need.
Words to know
- Personal data
- information about an identifiable person
- Data minimisation
- collecting only what you need
- Privacy notice
- the public statement of what you collect and why
- Breach
- unauthorised access to data
Sources
- FTC: Protecting Personal Information, A Guide for Business
- FTC: Privacy and Security Enforcement
- NCSL: Security Breach Notification Laws
Checked October 17, 2026. Pages on other sites change; if a source no longer says what the lesson says, the source wins.