Glossary · Records and compliance
Data retention
How long an organization keeps each kind of record, the reason for that period, and how the record is deleted or anonymized when it ends.
Data retention is an organization’s rule for how long it keeps each kind of record, why it keeps it that long, and how it deletes or anonymizes the record when the period ends.
Legal ceilings. Privacy laws limit how long personal data may be kept. The GDPR’s storage limitation principle, in Article 5(1)(e), allows personal data to be kept in a form that identifies people for no longer than the purposes require, with exceptions for archiving, research and statistics under safeguards. In Canada, PIPEDA’s fifth principle says to keep personal information only as long as it serves its purposes, to set minimum and maximum retention periods that account for legal requirements, and to dispose of it securely or make it anonymous.
Legal floors. Other rules require records to be kept for a minimum time. PIPEDA itself requires organizations to keep a record of every breach of security safeguards for two years. Sector rules can add their own minimums, and dispute windows set a practical one: evidence must outlive the period in which a customer can contest a transaction.
How it is enforced. A retention policy is a schedule: each data category, its purpose, its period and its deletion method. It only works if deletion happens automatically, including in logs and backups, and if someone can show it happened.
For agent exchanges. Records of agent-to-agent transactions pull both ways. Mandates and receipts are dispute evidence, so they must be kept long enough, yet they can contain personal data that should not be kept forever. AP2 leaves retention requirements for its mandates and receipts out of scope, so each party sets its own.
Emissar’s own practice. Emissar publishes its retention periods in its trust center and enforces them in code. Examples: messages to its public A2A agent are deleted after 90 days, early access and contact form entries after 24 months or sooner on request, and free tool results expire after 24 hours. A scheduled job deletes database records past these limits every day, and tool data is stored with an expiry.
Neighbouring terms. An audit trail is one of the record types a retention schedule must cover.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), Article 5(1)(e), EUR-Lex (accessed )
- OPC Canada: PIPEDA fair information principle 5, Limiting use, disclosure, and retention (accessed )
- OPC Canada: What you need to know about mandatory reporting of breaches of security safeguards (accessed )
- AP2 specification v0.2 (Dispute Evidence) (accessed )
- Emissar trust center (accessed )