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Data quality

Consent that survives an audit

A consent record has to answer four questions years later. Most consent flows can answer two of them.

A person using a self-service terminal in a public library

Outline. Each heading below carries one line saying what the section has to establish. Expand each into two to four paragraphs, put at least one number or worked example in the piece that nobody else could publish, then delete this note.

Consent is collected once and has to be defended for years. The test is not whether the box was ticked; it is whether you can reconstruct what the person was actually agreeing to.

The four questions an audit asks

What exactly, when, in what words, and how was withdrawal made available. Say which are usually missing.

Storing the wording, not just the timestamp

A consent flow that changed last year makes an old timestamp unreadable without the text that went with it.

Special categories change the shape of the question

Health, biometric and political data. Say what additional record each needs.

Withdrawal has to actually do something

A route that suppresses without deleting is not withdrawal. Describe what deletion means against an append-only ledger.

What a partner can and cannot inherit, and what has to be re-asked.

What our signup records, field by field

Concrete and checkable. This is the section that makes the piece worth citing.

Filed under Data quality

Who wrote this

OpinionReady Method Desk — Panel operations and data quality

The people who run the exchange day to day — supply operations, quality review and the payout queue. These notes come out of work we had to do anyway, written down because the same questions keep arriving from buyers and from members.

Written from our own operating record: the screening calls, field estimates and payout runs described here are ones we make on this exchange, not secondhand summaries of research done elsewhere.

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