1.4 Data Systems, Law, and Society
Architecture is shaped by human and legal needs, not just technical ones.
Architecture is shaped by human and legal needs, not just technical ones.
- GDPR (2018, EU) and CCPA (California) give people control and legal rights over personal data. The EU AI Act adds restrictions on how personal data can be used.
- Automated systems make consequential decisions: who gets a loan or insurance, who gets a job interview, who is suspected of a crime. Social media changed news consumption → political opinion → election outcomes.
- Legal requirements are reshaping system design foundations. GDPR's right to be forgotten (erasure on request) collides head-on with designs built on immutable append-only logs. How do you delete data in the middle of a file that is supposed to be immutable? How do you handle data already baked into derived datasets, like the training data of an ML model? These are unsolved engineering challenges.
- Regulations deliberately don't mandate technologies (tech changes too fast) — they state high-level principles subject to interpretation. So there's no checklist for "GDPR-compliant architecture."
Cost-benefit of storing data must include: liability and reputational damage from a leak, legal costs and fines from non-compliance, and the fact that governments or police may compel you to hand data over. When data could reveal criminalized behavior (homosexuality in several countries; seeking an abortion in several US states), storing it creates real safety risks for users — travel to a clinic is revealed by location data, or even by a log of IP addresses over time.
Data minimization (Datensparsamkeit): decide some data is not worth storing and delete it. This runs directly counter to the "big data" philosophy of hoarding speculatively. It aligns with GDPR: personal data may be collected only for a specified, explicit purpose, cannot later be used for another purpose, and must not be kept longer than necessary.
Industry compliance analogues: PCI (payment card industry) with frequent independent audits; SOC 2 Type 2 for software vendors, also third-party audited.