Jargonautica
Governance, Law and Regulation

Data Subject Rights

Also called: Right to Erasure, Subject Access Request

The set of things an individual can ask you to do with their data: tell them what you hold, correct it, delete it, stop using it. Models complicate all of these, because deleting a record from a database does not remove its influence from a model that trained on it.

Technical view

Rights include access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, with defined response deadlines. Complications specific to AI systems include locating personal data in prompts, logs, trajectories, embeddings and vector indexes, propagating deletion to derived artefacts, and the practical impossibility of erasure from trained weights. Practical responses include maintaining a data map covering derived stores, and preferring retrieval over fine-tuning for personal data so deletion is achievable.


Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Governance, Law and Regulation.

How it connects

Data Subject Rights links to 11 other terms. The faint lines are links between those terms. See it in the full graph.

Personally Identifiable InformationPersonally Identifi…General Data Protection RegulationGeneral Data Protec…MemoryMemoryRetention PolicyRetention PolicyAutomated Decision-making RightsAutomated Decision-…PersonalisationPersonalisationAnonymisation and PseudonymisationAnonymisation and P…Machine UnlearningMachine UnlearningData LineageData LineageChildren and AIChildren and AIConsentConsentData Subject Rights