GDPR Tutorial: Deleting Customer Data from Snowflake with Snowplow

With the enforcement of the GDPR, organizations using behavioral data must comply with the "right to be forgotten," necessitating the deletion of personal data upon a user's request, including from Snowplow pipelines stored in Snowflake. The process involves identifying and removing user data from the Snowplow atomic.events table in Snowflake, while understanding the implications of Snowflake's Time Travel and Fail-safe features on data retention and deletion. Time Travel allows querying of previous data versions for a retention period, while Fail-safe offers an additional recovery period, impacting the immediacy of full data erasure. Best practices for compliance include partitioning user identifiers in atomic tables, minimizing retention windows, automating erasure workflows, and ensuring downstream data refreshes. The integration of dbt can facilitate automated deletions as part of the orchestration pipeline, underscoring the importance of maintaining GDPR compliance through robust data governance practices.