GDPR for Developers: The Technical Compliance Guide Every Engineer Needs

GDPR for Developers: The Technical Compliance Guide Every Engineer Needs GDPR is not just a legal problem. It is a technical problem. Most data protection failures stem from architectural decisions made in sprint planning, not legal strategy sessions. As the engineer writing the code, you are on the front line of compliance — whether your company has a DPO or not. This guide covers what GDPR means for the code you write: schema design, API contracts, logging practices, third-party dependencies, and the workflows you need to handle data subject requests programmatically. Privacy by Design: Article 25 in Practice Article 25 of GDPR mandates "data protection by design and by default." This is not a vague aspiration — it has direct engineering implications. Data minimisation by default. Your system should collect only what it needs. If your signup form asks for a phone number but your application never uses it, remove the field. Every column in your database that stores personal data is a