Generally speaking, privacy by design (PbD) is pretty simple. Basically, it’s a procedural reminder to build user privacy principles into the development of a product or tool. Also, it’s a key tenet of the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is a sweeping regulation that will affect any organization with European users or members.
PbD became popular back in the 1990s, and was introduced by Ann Cavoukian, who at the time, was information and privacy commissioner of Ontario The Federal Trade Commission started calling it a best practice for data privacy, along with transparency and simplified choice in 2012.