5.25 Plan for a Digital Product or Service’s Care and End-of-Life
Everything ends at some point, planning for if and when a product or service is finalized makes good ethical sense to ensure customers can be transitioned toward a replacement rather than losing access to their data.
Criteria
- End-of-life Care: Clear, documented end-of-life guidelines exist that include data disposal, archiving, file deletion, etc guidance.
Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium
Benefits
- Environmental:
Many products or services keep unnecessary data and functionalities alive while they are not used or useful anymore. Planning for end-of-life reduces their long-term environmental impact by eliminating waste and allowing the freed-up resources to be utilized for other information. - Security:
Regular maintenance, updates, and care on outdated software and data can significantly reduce security risks. - Privacy:
Incorporating clear end-of-life policies that include a visitor’s right to be forgotten will benefit the visitor by explaining how you enforce data protection and comply with legislation. - Performance:
Removing unnecessary features, functions, and data of a service improves performance and resilience as the resources which were utilizing data will be better spent on more popular functionality, and the gains made from their elimination will be felt in terms of emissions through saved development time. - Economic:
Removing redundancy in the product or service can generate savings in hosting, security costs, and other third-party subscriptions.
GRI
- materials: Medium
- energy: Medium
- water: Medium
- emissions: Medium
Example
- This is a checklist for product end-of-life care.
Resources
- [AFNOR] Spec 5.2.6 (French)
- End of life
- [GPFEDS] 1.6 – Strategy (Data Collection) (PDF)
- [GPFEDS] 2.7 – Specifications (Maintainence & Decomissioning) (PDF)
- [GPFEDS] 7.2 – Back-End (Data Retention) (PDF)
- What Does End-of-life (EOL) Mean For Your Website Platform?
- What is Your Data Disposal Strategy?