Beyond compliance: Designing systems that earn customer trust

This article argues that customer trust depends on more than following rules, but rather on how systems actually handle data in practice. The author identifies five key areas for building trust: maintaining consistent customer intent across multiple systems, treating privacy as a distributed-systems problem (where data flows through many interconnected services), reducing unnecessary data collection, designing for system failures, and understanding how AI expands privacy responsibilities. A major challenge is ensuring that when a customer changes a privacy setting or requests data deletion, that choice is respected everywhere the data is used, not just in the initial system.