How The Atlantic Reduced Time Spent on Data Deletions by 95% with Teleskope
95%
Reduction in time spent on data deletions by the data team
100%
Data visibility across internal and third-party systems
97%
Reduction in cost per data deletion
“Teleskope was the only solution that did everything we needed, from data deletions to vendor coordination and PII detection. The platform has become a staple across our data security workflows.”
Introduction
Kyte unlocks the freedom to go places by delivering cars for any trip longer than a rideshare. As part of its goal to re-invent the car rental experience Kyte collects sensitive customer data, including driver’s licenses, delivery and return locations, and payments information. As Kyte continues to expand its customer base and implement new technologies to streamline operations, the challenge of ensuring data security becomes more intricate. Data is distributed across both internal cloud hosting as well as third party systems, making compliance with privacy regulations and data security paramount. Kyte initially attempted to address data labeling and customer data deletion manually, but this quickly became an untenable solution that could not scale with their business. Building such solutions in-house didn’t make sense either, as they would require constant updates to accommodate growing data volumes which would distract their engineers from their primary focus of transforming the rental car experience.
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Continuous Data Discovery and Classification
In order to protect sensitive information, you first need to understand it, so one of Kyte’s primary objectives was to continuously discover and classify their data at scale. To meet this need, Teleskope deployed a single-tenant environment for Kyte, and integrated their third-party saas providers and multiple AWS accounts. Teleskope discovered and crawled Kyte’s entire data footprint, encompassing hundreds of terabytes in their AWS accounts, across a variety of data stores. Teleskope instantly classified Kyte’s entire data footprint, identifying over 100 distinct data entity types across hundreds of thousands of columns and objects. Beyond classifying data entity types, Teleskope also surfaced the data subjects associated with the entities, enabling Kyte to categorize customer, employee, surfer, and business metadata separately. This automated approach ensures that Kyte maintains an up-to-date data map detailing the personal and sensitive data throughout their environment, enabling them to maintain a structured and secure environment.
Securing Data Storage and Infrastructure
Another critical aspect of Kyte’s Teleskope deployment was ensuring the secure storage of data and maintaining proper infrastructure configuration, especially as engineers spun up new instances or made modifications to the underlying infrastructure. While crawling Kyte’s cloud environment, Teleskope conducted continuous analysis of their infrastructure configurations to ensure their data was secure and aligned with various privacy regulations and security frameworks, including CCPA and SOC2. Teleskope helped Kyte identify and fortify unencrypted data stores, correct overly permissive access, and clean up stale data stores that hadn’t been touched in a while. With Teleskope deployed, Kyte’s team will be alerted in real time if one of these issues surfaces again.
End-to-End Automation of Data Subject Rights Requests
Kyte was also focused on streamlining data subject rights (DSR) requests. Whereas their team previously performed this task manually and with workflows and forms, Kyte now uses Teleskope to automate data deletion and access requests across various data sources, including internal data stores like RDS, and their numerous third-party vendors such as Stripe, Rockerbox, Braze, and more. When a new DSR request is received, Teleskope seamlessly maps and identifies the user’s data across internal tables containing personal information, and triggers the necessary access or deletion query for that specific data store. Teleskope also ensures compliance by automatically enforcing the request with third-party vendors, either via API integration or email, in cases where third parties don’t expose an API endpoint.
Conclusion
With Teleskope, Kyte has been able to effectively mitigate risks and ensure compliance with evolving regulations as their data footprint expands. Teleskope reduced operational overhead related to security and compliance by 80%, by automating the manual processes and replacing outdated and ad-hoc scripts. Teleskope allows Kyte’s engineering team to focus on unlocking the freedom to go places through a tech-enabled car rental experience, and helps to build systems and software with a privacy-first mindset. These tangible outcomes allow Kyte to streamline their operations, enhance data security, and focus on building a great, secure product for their customers.
Challenge
Continuous Data Deletion Drained Bandwidth for Value-Creating Work
The Atlantic has a lean but highly capable data team that manages a growing set of core responsibilities. From supporting editorial insights to managing privacy and compliance obligations, they act as the first line of defense across The Atlantic’s entire data footprint.
Of these core responsibilities, manually executing data deletion requests commanded a significant amount of the team’s limited time. Between querying and removing records from internal data warehouses and coordinating deletions with third-party vendors, the team would spend hours weekly on this task alone.
As data deletion requests rose, Aline Rollenhagen, Executive Director of Data, knew her team needed a better way to locate, classify, and expunge personally identifiable information (PII) across The Atlantic’s internal systems. The cost of doing nothing was clear: wasted engineering time, rising query costs, and mounting operational friction. While Aline briefly considered building an in-house solution, the upfront time investment and perpetual maintenance made this path unfeasible.
After evaluating several potential privacy partners, Aline discovered Teleskope. Upon learning how the platform covered the entire data deletion lifecycle, from PII detection and classification to internal deletions and third-party vendor integrations, she couldn’t wait to get started.
“Our data team was spending a significant amount of time executing deletions, which took them away from other valuable work. We needed a solution that would streamline our data security workflows at scale.”
Solution
End-to-End Data Deletion Workflows With Minimal Internal Lift
The Teleskope team worked closely with Aline to ensure the implementation was swift and seamless. Support was fast, hands-on, and responsive with regular Slack communications and syncs to keep progress on track.
With Teleskope’s AI-powered data discovery, Aline’s team instantly identifies and categorizes all sensitive information across The Atlantic’s cloud, on-premises data stores, and third-party sub-processors. After enrolling all relevant PII datasets into Teleskope, Aline’s team now handles deletion requests efficiently. Teleskope automatically scans those datasets, identifies whether the user exists in them, and enforces deletion accordingly, all without requiring manual intervention. This precision eliminates the need for blanket deletes and has significantly reduced query costs.
“Before, executing a single deletion request was inefficient,” Aline explains. “Now, Teleskope only queries what’s necessary; it’s more precise, faster, and cheaper.”
Beyond internal data deletion, Teleskope also streamlined coordination with third-party vendors. For instance, when The Atlantic switched to a new subscription management system — a platform for which no out-of-the-box connector existed — Teleskope’s team built a custom integration on day one. This dedication to interoperability enabled the data team to automatically include vendor-side deletions in their workflows, ensuring full compliance without the need for manual outreach or brittle internal scripts.
With accurate PII detection, targeted queries, and integrated third-party workflows, the team no longer had to stitch together tools, which required them to spend additional time manually double-checking that all data had been deleted. Most importantly, this gave Aline’s team back hours of bandwidth each week, time they could now allocate to other value-creating initiatives such as tracking KPIs and stakeholder communication.
“We were in the middle of a major migration to a new subscription system, and Teleskope didn’t have a connector for it yet. We flagged it during onboarding, and they just built one from scratch. No delays, no back-and-forth. It felt like working with an extension of our own team.”
Results
Enhanced Data Security, Reduced Manual Work, and More Bandwidth for Value-Creating Tasks
Teleskope transformed The Atlantic’s data deletion process into a unified, low-maintenance workflow. What once required hours of engineering time is now streamlined, scalable, and auditable from end to end, delivering measurable gains in speed, cost, and control.
- 95% reduction in time spent on data deletions by the data team
- 100% data visibility across internal and third-party systems
- 97% reduction in cost per data deletion
Today, Teleskope plays a central role in The Atlantic’s data privacy strategy. Moving forward, Aline’s goal is to eliminate the last manual step in the deletion process: entering user information to initiate a request. With Teleskope’s API, she sees a clear path to fully automating the workflow, allowing deletions to be triggered directly from upstream systems without any human involvement.
“We’ve thought about going even further, using Teleskope to remove the need for any human involvement at all. We’re eager to work with Teleskope to push our internal efficiencies even further.”
The Atlantic is one of America’s oldest and most respected magazines and publishers, known for its long-form analysis on politics, culture, technology, and more. With over a century of history and notable awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), The Atlantic has become synonymous with thoughtful, high-quality journalism.