Data retention
The policy defining how long a business keeps message and contact data before deleting it. Retention limits reduce both regulatory exposure and breach impact.
One term from the WhatsApp Business Platform glossary. Last updated 2026-07-25.
Data protection regimes generally require personal data to be kept no longer than the purpose requires. In practice this means a defined retention period per data type, with automatic deletion rather than manual cleanup.
Retention interacts with legal holds: data subject to an ongoing dispute or investigation has to be exempted from automatic deletion, which is why a retention feature without a hold mechanism is incomplete for regulated businesses.
Related terms
- DPDP Act
- India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which governs how businesses collect, process and store the personal data of people in India, including messaging contact data.
- DSAR
- A data subject access request — a person asking a business what personal data it holds about them, and in many cases asking for it to be corrected or deleted.
- Audit log
- An append-only record of who did what inside a platform and when. It cannot be edited after the fact, which is what makes it usable as evidence.
See Data retention in a real workspace
BotPulsar runs the official WhatsApp Business Platform with unlimited team members on every plan, starting at ₹300/month.