Identity decay management

Description

The pattern that handles what happens when identifiers age out, consent is withdrawn, cookies expire, or customers go dormant. Defines the graceful degradation path: which signals remain usable, which fall back to anonymous, which are deleted entirely. Most martech stacks treat identity as permanent and break in interesting ways when it isn't.

Common failure modes

• 01No defined decay schedule, so identifiers accumulate indefinitely and the database becomes a slow archive of stale relationships
• 02Consent withdrawal not propagated to derived attributes, so the raw data is gone but the inferences built from it remain in active use
• 03Dormant customer signals treated as current, polluting model training and producing predictions calibrated against people who left
• 04Right-to-be-forgotten requests handled at the surface tables, not in the underlying derived data, making the deletion incomplete

Tools for this pattern

The capability a stack needs to run this pattern, and the vendors that provide it, on Martech Stack Builder.

• NeedsConsent-aware Profile Management
• RelatedData Retention / Deletion

Recipes composing this pattern