
If your company finds Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) overwhelming, you’re not the only one. These requests are essential for compliance with data privacy laws but they can also be complex and time-consuming to handle.
Fortunately, this guide is here to walk you through everything you need to know: what DSARs are, who submits them, how to respond, and how to automate the process.
A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) is a formal request from an individual to access the personal data your organization holds about them. It stems from privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and VCDPA, which aim to increase transparency and give people control over their personal information.
But DSARs go beyond simple access. Individuals can also request:
Privacy laws have expanded individual rights and increased regulatory risks for businesses. Mishandling a DSAR can lead to:
Managing DSARs effectively is now a business imperative.
Any data subject can submit a request, including:
In some cases, authorized representatives (such as parents or legal guardians) can submit DSARs on someone’s behalf. In these cases, it's imperative to verify that the person submitting the DSAR is genuinely doing so on behalf of the data subject. Businesses can do this by requesting supporting information and evidence of their relationship (e.g., birth certificates, power of attorney documentation, etc.).
DSARs usually request a copy of all personal data you have on a data subject. Sometimes, the subject may only request access to specific details and information. Either way, you're obligated to provide any data that is relevant to the individual's request for access to their information.
You must provide all relevant personal data you process, including:
Depending on the request, individuals may also ask for data to be corrected, deleted, or opted out of processing.
Read more: CCPAÂ DSARÂ process
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Under the CCPA, you must respond to a DSAR within 45 days. The GDPR data privay regulations only gives you 30 days to respond to a DSAR. Although both laws offer extensions in certain cases, failure to respond to a DSAR within the proscribed timeframes can result in substantial fines and regulatory penalties.
Failure to fulfill a request can also damage your organization's reputation by suggesting that you don’t value data protection and information transparency.
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Even with best practices in place, responding to DSARs can be difficult due to:
Personal data can exist across multiple company data privacy manager systems. Personal data is spread across CRMs, support tools, cloud apps, logs, backups, and third parties. Without data mapping, it's hard to find everything.
Depending on your organization’s size, DSAR fulfillment may require accessing data across dozens or even hundreds of systems—including legacy tools, cloud platforms, data warehouses, and third-party apps. This complexity makes handling even a single DSAR time-consuming and resource-intensive. Â
Without centralized data, businesses often need data mapping, privacy management tools, and reporting systems to locate and compile personal information. Since customer data is scattered across CRMs, finance tools, service platforms, logs, and backups, managing a complete and accurate data inventory remains a significant challenge for most companies.
Personal data can exist in multiple formats and records. A single user might appear as a name in one system, an email in another, and a hashed ID in a third. Aligning these requires data unification across formats.
Personal data is scattered across systems and stored under various identifiers—like names, emails, cookies, or account numbers. One person might appear as “John Smith” in one system and a cookie ID or membership number in another.
To fulfill or automate a DSAR, you first need to identify and match this fragmented data. If a request comes via an email not used as a system identifier, you may need more info from the user or face challenges locating their data. Without accurate identification, DSAR automation becomes unfeasible, and compliance risks increase.
Current tools for fulfilling consumer access requests are inadequate. Ticketing systems help with request tracking but can’t discover, redact, or delete data. Manual work still dominates most fulfillment processes.
Even if you locate all of a data subject’s information, fulfilling a DSAR still means executing each step across multiple systems. Ticketing tools can help manage workflows by creating requests, sending alerts, and tracking deadlines—but they don’t automate finding, deleting, or updating personal data.
The manual orchestration of those tasks remains your responsibility, and it's often the most time-consuming part of DSAR compliance. While support tools help organize the process, true DSAR automation—like what Ketch offers—is needed to fully streamline and scale your response workflow.
So can DSAR orchestration ever be truly automated? Luckily, that's exactly what Ketch is for. Ketch can automate your DSAR response process.
Data deletion (right to be forgotten) is more complex than access requests. It requires identifying every instance of a subject’s data and confirming whether you’re legally allowed to delete it.
To handle deletion requests, you must:
Ketch automates all of this, giving you full control over your data lifecycle and regulatory compliance with GDPR, CCPA and more.
DSARs are a legal obligation, a data management challenge, and an opportunity to earn trust. To manage them effectively:
Ketch makes it possible to do all three—with confidence.
Read further:Â DSRÂ automation
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Schedule your Ketch demo and learn how our platform can simplify your response workflow for DSARs and data deletion requests.