Agent Wranglers

Records and data map Required

Keep one retention schedule

Keep one retention schedule that gives every kind of personal data a period, the reason for it and the job that enforces it.

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Base each period on a need or a law, such as seven years for bookkeeping records in many EU countries. Name the event that starts the clock, such as account closure. Each entry points to a deletion job, built as the retention jobs rule describes. The privacy policy and the record of processing read their periods from this one file. Logs follow the log retention rule. Backups get their own entry, with the period from backup retention.

Example

- id: support-tickets
  data: support messages and attachments
  period: P2Y
  starts: ticket closed
  reason: handle follow-up complaints and warranty claims
  job: delete-closed-tickets
- id: invoices
  data: invoices and payment records
  period: P7Y
  starts: end of financial year
  reason: bookkeeping law
  job: delete-old-invoices

How to check

Every record entry names a schedule entry, and every schedule entry names a job. Monitoring fails when a job has not succeeded in 48 hours. A daily query fails when the oldest row in a table is older than its period plus one day.

For agents: if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in Based on the Agent Wranglers compliance playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/compliance/records-and-data-map/retention-schedule.