Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Personal Privacy: Incredible Parallels

Published at 10:28 on 25 Aug 2024

Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism discusses the benefits of focusing on a small number of digital activities that actually support your values (and ignoring the rest). Reducing digital clutter, he argues, decreases the amount of time spent on activities that aren’t of net value while also increasing intentionality. We think organisations could learn a lot from Cal Newport’s principles when it comes to data management.

Important Principles From Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport advocates the following principles to make the most of digital adoption: 

  • Focus on maximising positive value gained from activities.
  • Prioritise high-value activities over many low-value ones.
  • Start with your core principles and filter activities based on their alignment.
  • Digital clutter is stressful; reduce it.
  • Attention is scarce; be mindful of how you spend it.
  • The best online activities often improve offline life.
  • Be cautious of tools that create problems to solve.

Key Takeaways For Organisations

The parallels between these principles and data privacy best practices are incredible. Let’s dig into that: 

Focus on Maximising Positive Value Gained from Activities

In the context of organisational data, this means prioritising data that genuinely furthers your organisation’s goals and objectives. In other words, avoid over-collecting data or intrusive data collection practices “just in case.” Every piece of data you hold comes with a responsibility and a potential risk—a responsibility that Australian customers are becoming increasingly aware of. 

Prioritize High-Value Activities Over Many Low-Value Ones

Not all data is equally valuable, and your user experience should reflect this. We’re seeing more organisations move to less data-intensive practices, and we expect this trend to continue. 

Since your customers are likely to be less interested in handing over their data (or they will at least weigh the value of providing their data), it may be time to consider better highlighting the value of your gated resources, moving to an ‘email only’ model for newsletter signups (instead of account creation), and other less intrusive practices across your operations more broadly. 

This requires focus. You need to identify the data that drives insights and decision-making and focus your efforts on collecting, protecting, and using this high-value data. 

Start with Your Core Principles 

This principle encourages people to consider “will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?” before implementing digital tools. We suggest adopting a similar approach to data collection to avoid overcollection or collection “just in case”. 

To do this, we suggest adopting a decision-making framework for digital tools that collect, process, or use data you collect (or collection and use data on your organisation’s behalf) that considers whether the tool will add significant value to the organisation in terms of it achieving high-value outcomes. If a data-intensive tool doesn’t align with high-value outcomes, it should not be implemented. 

Achieving this requires you to define, document, and share your organization’s core values and business goals (ideally at the departmental level).

Digital Clutter is Stressful; Reduce It

This is exactly what practicing data minimisation forces you to do! 

Data minimisation seems one of the hottest privacy and security topics around at the moment. It’s an important risk mitigator plus a great way to kick off more mature data management practices. (And it’s linked to the new-ish ISO 27001 Annex A Data Deletion control. Lots of boxes ticked!) 

In addition to increased data risk, data clutter can lead to inefficiencies. So, there’s a strong business case for purging outdated data records, too. 

To achieve this, we recommend regularly auditing and tidying up your data stores. You should also implement data retention policies so your team has some guidance about when to delete data and when to hold it. 

Attention is Scarce

There are a few directions this one could take us in terms of how it applies to organisational data management:

  • Communicate your data practices transparently and clearly, since this takes your users’ valuable time and attention into consideration and respects it. (Transparency was one of the key focus areas in this year’s Privacy Awareness Week, you can read more about it here)
  • Your team’s attention is scarce, so implementing data-intensive practices and asking your team to make sense of the clutter and noise is going to be inefficient and likely ineffective.

The Best Online Activities Improve Offline Life

For organisations looking to improve their data management and practices, the lesson here is simple: Users are likely to happily hand over their data if it is clearly beneficial for them to do so (and proportionate to the risk). 

Your customers know that data can be a powerful tool for optimising their experiences online (and often in the real-world). So, if you clearly detail why you’re collecting data and showcase that you will use it to improve their experiences, you’ll improve trust and loyalty while also increasing transparency. 

Be Cautious of Tools that Create Problems to Solve

We often see digital tools that cause more headaches than they solve:

  • The Australian Federal Police has hopefully learned its lesson at this point, after its adoption of Clearview AI and Auror both attracted the OAIC’s attention. 
  • Organisations that have implemented third-party software and then experienced a data breach via that third party may also be painfully aware of the problems tools can cause. 

You should bear in mind that most tools you choose to implement come at a cost, whether that’s increased risk to manage, data clutter or overcollection, or something else. With those costs in mind, you can then more clearly decide which tools are ‘worth it’ for your organisation. 

If your organisation needs help implementing better data management practices, reach out. Our experienced privacy professionals are available to help. 

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Privacy, security and training. Jodie is one of Australia’s leading privacy and security experts and the Founder of Privacy 108 Consulting.