Refresher: I'm the customer (Victoria) and the Bakery is the company collecting my data and processing it to provide a service. Add a "(co)" to Victoria and it's your B2B deal.
What stewardship actually requires
A harmonious, efficient buyer-vendor relationship runs on trust and verification. Meanwhile, you can't verify what you haven't mapped. The Bakery needs a living system that tracks:
• What data is processed (specifics, not just categories);
• How it's processed - the data flow, and who has access, both inside the company and downstream;
• The controls that enforce those limits internally - so "we only use it for X" is something the system does, not just something the policy says;
• For any downstream (subprocessor) processing, what security covers that access - and the capability to monitor that it holds;
• Who owns the map, and who gets pinged when product or engineering wants to ship a new feature;
• A central source of truth, so anyone can find out (or knows who to ask) what data can be used and how.
Why the Bakery owns this
The party that wants to use the data is the party that has to map it. Data-use rights come from consent and licenses, and a blanket "we can use everything to improve our services" consent isn't reasonable or, increasingly, enforceable. If you want to use my data, you enumerate the uses and earn the consent in good faith, which you can't do if you don't know what you're holding.
And here's the part that's new since the last data cycle.
• Pre-AI, the deletion question was answerable: find the data, return it or destroy it.
• Post-AI, if data flows into a model without clean tracking, you may keep the right to delete on paper but lose any practical remedy - there's no delete key for a trained model the way there is for a database row; this applies to any subprocessor whose features run on AI, not just your direct vendor. The leverage has to be front-loaded, because the back end may not exist.
If you can't say what you hold and how it moves, you can't promise compliance, you can't honor a deletion request, and you can't grant a clean license. The map is the precondition for all three.
Let me know if there are alternative views.
Wrinkle 004 next.
