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by bunsenmcdubbs 2073 days ago
> Hopefully this data stucture can be extended to completely remove every bit of tracking information collected about a user, so that it can comply with GDPR and respect privacy

This is already the case! Interestingly enough, our identity tracking mechanisms actually make it easier to delete users and purge _all_ of their data in the same way it makes unifying all their data for analysis easier in the first place.

When a GDPR request comes in through our API, we search for the matching user in our database. If we find a matching user, we'll look in our Identity system ('s union-find data structure) to find all the other user_ids which were associated with that canonical identity. Then we'll go through and delete all the data for every constituent user. This is essentially a reverse look up (find the set of user_ids for a canonical user_id/identity) and is easy to execute.