What is the right to rectification?
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Under GDPR Article 16, anyone whose personal data you hold can ask you to correct it if it's inaccurate or complete it if it's incomplete. That's the right to rectification.
In email marketing, this usually means someone asking you to update their name, email address, or other profile information you've stored. It can also mean asking you to add information they feel is missing from their record.
You have one month to respond and make the correction. Extensions to three months are allowed for complex requests, but you have to notify the person within the first month that you're taking more time.
What you need to do in practice:
First, verify the person's identity before making any changes. You don't want to let someone else update a subscriber's data. Second, update the record in your ESP, CRM, and any other system where it exists. Third, if you've shared that data with any processors or third parties, you need to notify them of the correction too.
This is where keeping a clean data map matters. If you've sent subscriber data to an analytics tool, a retargeting platform, or a sub-processor, you're responsible for ensuring corrections flow through to those systems as well.
For most email marketers, the right to rectification is one of the simpler data subject rights to handle, as long as your systems are organized enough to find and update records quickly.
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