The purpose people withdraw from first

Marketing consent is the easiest place to see whether an implementation is real. It is the purpose people most often withdraw from, the one most likely to have been bundled into signup, and the one where a failure produces a message arriving in someone's inbox after they asked it to stop.

Unbundling what signup collected

Most existing marketing permission was collected as part of account creation, alongside terms acceptance and service communication. Under Sec. 6(1) that is one consent standing in for several purposes. Separating them is not only a compliance step — it is the only way a person can turn off promotional email while keeping transactional notifications, which is what they usually want.

The three destinations a withdrawal has to reach

A withdrawal recorded in your consent store has done nothing until it reaches:

1. The sending systems — email service provider, SMS gateway, push infrastructure
2. The audience platforms — advertising audiences and lookalike sets built from the same list
3. The warehouse — the analytics copy that feeds segmentation and gets re-exported

The second and third are the ones that leak. An advertising audience uploaded last month keeps serving after a withdrawal unless something actively removes the record, and a warehouse copy will quietly rebuild the segment on its next run.

What the record has to show

For each contactable person: which purposes are currently consented, when each was given, under which notice version and language, and — where consent has been withdrawn — when the withdrawal was recorded and when each downstream system confirmed it. That last column is the one nobody builds until they need it.