A regulator asks how you ensure marketing consent withdrawal is honoured everywhere. What does the architecture need to show?
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The answer they want is mechanism plus evidence
Not "we have a consent database". They want to see how a withdrawal reaches every system that could act on it, and how you know it did.
The four properties to demonstrate
Granularity matching what was presented. If the interface offered four separate purposes, consent must be recorded per purpose. A single "accept" mapped to four processing activities cannot demonstrate consent for any of them.
Versioning. Consent is to a specific statement at a specific time. The record must hold which version of the notice was shown and when — that pairing is the evidence.
Propagation. Every downstream consumer must receive the change. The stronger architecture publishes a consent event that each system subscribes to, rather than a central table each system is trusted to check — because the second relies on every system remembering to check, and one that does not will not report an error.
Withdrawal as a first-class operation, including systems that received the record months earlier. This is the part most often missing: systems are built to receive an opt-in and have no path for the reversal.
The evidence to produce
For a given individual: the consent record with its version and timestamp, the withdrawal with its timestamp, the propagation log showing each system that received it and acknowledged, and the suppression state in each downstream platform.
If you cannot produce that chain for one person, the control is not demonstrable regardless of how it is designed.
The failure mode to check for before they do
A withdrawal recorded centrally while a downstream platform, which received the contact months earlier, continues to process. The person experiences no change and complains, and your own database says everything is correct.
Test it: withdraw consent for a test record and verify suppression in every downstream system. If that has never been done end to end, do it before answering.