The right to export and erasure is not a checkbox. It is a feature to design, especially when data is linked.
Data export and deletion are obligations, but also an architecture test. A product that cannot cleanly return or erase a user’s data has a design problem, not just a compliance one.
Erase without breaking everything
Hard-deleting a row breaks references: orders, invoices, history. The right approach separates what must disappear (personal data) from what must remain for legal or accounting reasons, in anonymised form.
Soft-delete with anonymisation replaces identifying fields with neutral values while preserving accounting integrity. The user disappears, not the consistency of the database.
Return data in a useful format
The export gathers data scattered across several tables into a readable, re-importable document. Planned early, it is trivial. Bolted on later, it is a recurring chore.
Treating these rights as a feature, not a constraint, forces better data modelling.