hardDesignScenarioSeniorStaffLead
How do you know what personal data you hold and where it lives, and what makes that map wrong within a month?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Enterprise Captive, Big Tech, Product Startup
Answer
Short answer
A hand-maintained inventory is wrong the week after it is signed off, because new sinks, new fields inside existing payloads and human copies all arrive without a review.
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Likely follow-ups
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- Your classifier flags a column as personal data and the owning team disagrees. Who decides, and on what basis?
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