The moment your project has users, you're holding data about real people. Most of the obligations are common sense, and following them is considerably easier than dealing with a breach.

Collect less

The most effective privacy measure is not having the data. For every field you collect, ask what you'd actually do differently with the answer. Most forms contain two or three fields nobody ever looks at.

Data you don't hold can't leak, can't be requested, and can't be subpoenaed.

Know where it is

Write down every place personal data lives: your database, your logs, your error reporting service, your analytics, your email provider, your backups, the spreadsheet you exported once.

That last category is where most people are surprised. Exports and backups are real copies with real obligations.

Don't log it

Logs get read, shipped to third parties, and kept far longer than intended. Never log passwords, tokens, card details, or full personal records. Log identifiers, not contents.

Error reporting services are the common leak — a captured exception often includes the entire request body.

Delete on a schedule

Data with no retention limit accumulates forever. Decide how long you need each category, and actually delete beyond it. This is both a legal expectation in many places and a real reduction in your exposure.

The rights people have

In the UK, EU and increasingly elsewhere, people can ask what you hold, ask for a copy, ask for corrections, and ask for deletion. You need to be able to do all four, which mostly means knowing where the data is.

privacy-audit.txt
My app collects: <list every field>
It's stored in: <database, logs, analytics, email provider, backups>

Review it:
- Which fields could I stop collecting without losing anything?
- Where might personal data end up that I haven't listed — logs,
  error reports, exports, caches?
- What retention period is sensible for each category?
- If someone asked me to delete everything about them, what would I
  have to touch? List every location.

Then: what's the highest-risk thing here, and what's the cheapest fix?

Write the policy honestly

A privacy policy describing what you actually do is short and easy to write. A copied one describing practices you don't follow is worse than none — it's a written record of a promise you're breaking.

If you'd be uncomfortable with a user reading your database, that's the signal. It's their data; you're holding it on their behalf.