Deleting the Undeletable: Managing PII at Shopify - Shopify

What this post added

Introduced a schematization system for analytical events, defining structure, ownership, and privacy context (data controller, data subject, PII type). Implemented obfuscation (masking/generalizing PII like IP addresses and user agents) and tokenization (exchanging PII with consistent, random tokens mapped in a secure vault) as PII transformation techniques. The tokenization vault service ensures consistency and multi-controller properties for tokens, enabling efficient PII deletion by removing mappings rather than directly manipulating large datasets.