We leave information behind almost everywhere we go online.

Not necessarily because we deliberately provide it, but because our interactions themselves create information.

• When we connected.
• Where we connected from.
• What we interacted with.
• How often we returned.
• What happened before and afterwards.

Individually these fragments can appear insignificant.

Together, they can say a great deal.

And that raises an interesting question:

Why should completing one digital interaction reveal information about everything around it?

Think about the physical world

Imagine walking into a café and buying a coffee.

The café needs enough information to complete the transaction.

It doesn’t need to know where you were before you arrived.

It doesn’t need to know where you go afterwards.

It doesn’t need a history of every other café you’ve visited.

And it doesn’t need to create a permanent record simply because you walked through the door.

Yet digital interactions often operate very differently.

The interaction itself can generate information beyond what is required to provide the service.

We have come to regard that as an unavoidable consequence of being online.

But what if it isn’t?

Knowing less can be a deliberate choice

For leaders, Zero Knowledge, Zero Metadata introduces a different way of thinking about information.

We usually start by asking:

How should we protect the information our systems generate?

A more fundamental question is:

Why are our systems generating that information in the first place?

That distinction matters.

Information that never exists doesn’t have to be stored.

It doesn’t have to be governed.

It doesn’t have to be protected.

And organisations don’t have to explain why they retained it.

A greenfield opportunity

For a new platform, there is an opportunity to question information generation before it becomes embedded in the business.

Instead of collecting everything and deciding later what is useful, start from the opposite position:

What information is actually necessary for this interaction to work?

That changes the conversation.

Data stops being something automatically produced by digital activity and becomes something whose existence must have a purpose.

The challenge for established organisations

Existing organisations face a different problem.

Years of technology, analytics, security practices and operating processes may have been built around information that systems generate automatically.

Adoption therefore doesn’t have to begin with removing everything.

It can begin by asking:

If we were designing this interaction today, would we deliberately choose to create this information?

If the answer is no, its continued existence deserves examination.

From protecting information to preventing unnecessary information

This is the leadership significance behind ICCA Design Principles: Zero Knowledge, Zero Metadata.

It changes the starting point.

Not:

How much information can we safely hold?

But:

How little information do we need to create?

Those are fundamentally different questions.

One manages the consequences of information.

The other questions whether those consequences need to exist.

A question for leaders

Look at an ordinary interaction between a customer and your organisation.

Then ask:

How much information is required to provide that service?

And compare that with:

How much information does the interaction actually generate?

The difference between those two answers may be more important than we realise.

That is the adoption question behind ICCA Design Principles: Zero Knowledge, Zero Metadata.

The underlying ICCA work is openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.

The paper describes the architectural principle. The article asks what adopting that principle could mean for organisations and the people they serve.

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