Data retention

This page states, in one place, how long Consentfolio keeps consent data and what's actually in it.

Consent validity: 12 months

A visitor's consent is valid for 12 months. A returning visitor is re-prompted when either:

• their consent record is more than 12 months old, or
• the consent-material parts of your published configuration have changed since they last chose (categories, purpose text, script lists, or the Consent Mode mapping — cosmetic changes like colors or copy wording do not force a re-prompt).

Receipt retention: life of the consent + 1 year

Each consent event (accept, reject, custom choice, update, or withdrawal) is recorded as a receipt. Receipts are retained for the life of the consent they represent, plus 1 year after that consent is superseded or expires — about two years in total for a consent that runs its full validity. After that window, receipts are permanently and irreversibly deleted by an automated monthly purge — there is no manual step and no extended grace period beyond the monthly cadence.

Data minimization

Consent receipts are deliberately minimal. They do not contain:

• IP address
• User-agent / browser fingerprint
• The page URL the consent was given on

What they do contain is limited to what's needed to prove a consent event happened and reconstruct it later: the consent choices made (per category, before and after), the published configuration version those choices were made against, a client-generated visitor UUID, a client-generated event UUID, the origin host the request came from, and server/client timestamps. Nothing in a receipt feeds into analytics or is used for tracking.

Cancellation

If a project is canceled, its receipts, CSV export, and visitor-UUID DSAR lookup all remain accessible — read-only — for the same retention window described above. Canceling does not shorten or reset that clock, and it does not delete anything early.

Data subject requests (DSAR)

Each project supports a CSV export of its receipts and a lookup by visitor UUID. The preferences modal shows visitors their own consent ID and date, so a visitor can quote that ID back to you (or to us, if applicable) to have their record located quickly.