Data Retention Policy

1. The rule

Everything Warsha holds has a retention trigger and a period, or an explicit statement that neither has been settled.

The Data Retention Register is the inventory. This policy is how entries get into it.

2. Triggers, not calendars

Retention runs from an event, not from a date on a calendar: account closure, booking completion, dispute resolution, field confirmation.

This matters because "kept for two years" is ambiguous about when the two years start, and an ambiguous retention rule is one nobody can execute or audit.

3. When a period is unsettled

Several categories Warsha holds — identity documents, criminal-record certificates, financial records — may be subject to statutory retention periods under Egyptian law that have not been established by advice for this platform.

Where that is so, the register records the period as a proposal, records that no statutory basis is claimed, marks it pending legal review, sets the action at expiry to manual review rather than deletion, and leaves the rule disabled so that nothing can execute against it.

The alternative — writing a plausible number and letting an automated job delete records against it — risks destroying evidence someone is entitled to, or that Warsha is required to keep. A proposal marked as a proposal is honest. A guess presented as a legal period is not.

4. Minimum periods that are set

A worker's original identity document and criminal-record certificate are retained for at least one year from upload, so that a safety report, a dispute or an audit arising afterwards can be examined against what was actually submitted.

This is a floor set by Warsha for evidential reasons. It is not a claim about a statutory requirement.

5. What survives an account

Records concerning two people — bookings, payments, disputes, reviews — survive one of them leaving, because the other may still need them and because a financial record with one side deleted is not a record.

Surviving records are anonymised: personal identifiers are removed or replaced, and what remains is the transaction rather than the person.

The register states, per category, whether the treatment on closure is deletion, anonymisation, or preservation.

6. Legal holds

Where a record is subject to a legal hold, retention is suspended for it and deletion is refused, including a deletion the person has requested.

The person is told their request is blocked and why, in the terms Warsha is permitted to use.

7. Execution

A retention rule executes only when it is enabled, has passed legal review, and has a defined action. As at this version no rule created by Warsha is enabled.

Every rule supports a dry run that reports what it would affect without touching anything, and a rule is examined that way before it is ever enabled.