Deleting the Undeletable: Managing PII at Shopify - Shopify

This post details the development of a schematization system to enforce event schemas, including privacy context, and the implementation of obfuscation and tokenization techniques to handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in event data, enabling effective deletion by managing token-to-PII mappings in a secure vault. The schematization system captures event structure, ownership, and privacy context, with over 4500 active schemas. Obfuscation masks or removes identifying data while preserving analytical value, and tokenization exchanges PII with consistent random tokens stored in a separate vault service. This approach allows for efficient deletion of PII by removing mappings from the vault, rendering tokens in the data warehouse non-detokenizable.