Data protection impact assessments (DPIA), sometimes referred to as a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), are a tool used to describe how you intend to process and protect the personal information(PI, PII, etc) of individuals. Many forms of regulation including the GDPR and some compliance standards will require a DPIA depending on the risk levels associated with the data you are processing.

As builders of software we like to talk about user-centered design. We put ourselves in the mindset of the person using our app, service, or product. Successful user-driven companies bake this process into every part of their software lifecycle. It doesn’t stop at the initial research. Every decision is paired with the question: What about the user? The same approach can be taken when building with privacy in mind. The notion of Privacy By Design (PbD) does that.