When someone asks where you got their details, you need an answer. How recording who released each contact, and when, turns a scramble into a lookup.
Under GDPR, people have the right to ask what personal data a company holds about them and where it came from. For marketing databases built from bought lists, event scans and years of imports, answering that question can take hours of digging, and sometimes the honest answer is that nobody knows.
The fix is to record provenance at the moment a contact enters the database: which employee's relationship it came from, who released it, when, and whether they edited it first. With that record, a data subject request becomes a lookup rather than an investigation.
Provenance also helps with erasure. When a person asks to be forgotten, or an employee removes a contact permanently, it should never be raised again from the same mailbox. A contact discovery system has to remember the decision, not just delete the record.
Every record RelationLens delivers carries who released it and when. An append-only log covers the life of the account, and every export can be re-downloaded for 24 months. When an employee removes a contact, it is deleted for good and never raised again. For a company with $100 million in revenue, fewer manual privacy requests is estimated at about $27,400 a year.