Journal
Building a UK-compliant analytics stack without emptying the taxonomy
Legal reviews in the United Kingdom do not kill taxonomies. Unbounded property lists do. When a counsel asks “what personal data sits on this packet?”, a team that cannot answer with a contour plate will offer to delete the craft entirely. That is how you end up with page views and a prayer.
A compliant stack, as we teach it from Milton, is a governed one. You know which packets exist, which properties are allowed, how long a trail lives, and who may mint a new name. You can then have an adult conversation about identifiers, special category data, and whether a free-text field is a confession box wearing an analytics hat.
International transfers still happen — vendors, subprocessors, a parent company. Pretending otherwise is not a strategy. Document the flow, minimise the payload, and keep the taxonomy small enough to inspect. A hundred events with three frozen properties is easier to defend than twenty events with a JSON blob “for later”.
Retention of analytics data is a product decision dressed as a legal one. If you cannot say why a session trail needs to live beyond a stated window, you will be asked to shorten it. Shortening is fine. What is not fine is silently dropping the only packet that made retention readable, then acting surprised when the board asks for the old curve.
Our Privacy-bound Instrumentation programme is three weeks because the work is briefing, not theatre. Bring counsel to one session if you can. They would rather see a forbidden-sea plate than a slide that says “we take privacy seriously”. So would we.