What is Data Minimisation? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Data minimisation is one of the seven principles of UK GDPR (Article 5(1)(c)). It requires that personal data collected and processed must be adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary for the specified purpose. In practice: collect only the fields you actually need, don't collect data "just in case it might be useful later," and delete data when it is no longer needed for the original purpose.
Data-minimisation in the UK
Data minimisation has direct technical implications for UK software development. Analytics: only capture the user behaviour data genuinely needed for product improvement decisions — not every click and scroll. Registration forms: only request fields that are genuinely required for the service — not optional demographic data. Search indexes: personal data in search indexes (Elasticsearch, Algolia) must be minimised — only index the personal fields that users actually need to search by. Data lakes: raw personal data should not be stored indefinitely "for future analytics" — retention policies must be enforced technically, not just documented. ClickMasters includes data minimisation review as part of our UK GDPR architecture work.
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