3 ms·

Storing names separately can help but the subset of data you have a legitimate legal reason to "refuse to forget" can change faster than you would want to rewri

• raverbashing 6y ago
  You need to denormalize the non-forgettable information. This way you don't have to worry about what you can delete or not. Store Invoices, billing, etc, separately. These also usually have a fixed pre-determined retaining policy time. Past that time? Anonymize/aggregate or just delete it.
  • soco 6y ago
    Legislation can change and what you once thought to be forgettable becomes suddenly not.
    • aaronmdjones 6y ago
      It'd be extremely unusual for such changes to be retrospective. For example, if you are currently required to keep certain kinds of financial records for 3 years, and you delete records older than that, you won't be held at fault when that law gets updated to say 5 years, and you then fail to produce a 4-year-old document; it has not yet been a year since the new law took effect. This extends to criminal law too, for example with statutes of limitation. If, 20 years and 1 day ago, there was a 20-year statute of limitations for murder charges, you cannot be charged for committing a murder on that day (barring extraneous circumstances, such as tolling); even if a law was passed the day after said murder removing this limitation.
      • soco 6y ago
        Well, yes, but the topic here was data. And if at some time you thought it was forgettable and you scheduled it for deletion, once the law changes you should make damn sure all code involved in that deletion was checked or the data will be gone - against the new law. A big opportunity for human error here.