I would like to highlight an important improvement need regarding how marketing interaction data (such as email sends, opens, clicks) are managed and deleted within Microsoft’s platforms.

At present, the deletion options are limited and quite coarse-grained — it’s essentially an all-or-nothing approach. This creates challenges for us from both an operational and compliance perspective:

• Operational need: We must retain historical data for analysis and evaluation of communication activities. However, there are situations where we need to remove specific interactions or data linked to individual users, without losing other valuable aggregate history.

• Compliance (GDPR): According to GDPR requirements and our internal policies, personal data cannot be stored longer than necessary. We apply a two-year retention limit for interaction data, but the current all-or-nothing deletion model makes it difficult to enforce selective deletion. This can result in data being retained longer than legally allowed.

We therefore see a clear need for more granular and flexible deletion capabilities, such as the ability to:

1. Delete interactions based on a specific date range (e.g., older than 24 months).
2. Delete interactions related to a specific user or contact.
3. Retain anonymized or non-personal metadata for continued analysis.

Such functionality would not only support better data protection and GDPR compliance but also enhance the overall value of Microsoft’s products by giving customers more precise control over their data.

Kind Regards

Martin