18 Jan 2026 · Journal
Mapping GB privacy onto mobile cohorts
A cohort is a claim about people. In the United Kingdom that claim sits next to UK GDPR, PECR, and store-level tracking prompts that can go dark after install. If your activation window requires an event that only fires when analytics is allowed, you are measuring a permission, not a habit.
Schema Flowgrid asks every Retention Studio map to include a holding set for users whose events are incomplete because of consent. Folding them into “churned” is how privacy-conscious customers get labelled as failures. That is both a statistical error and a cultural one.
Practical sequence: write the window as if consent were perfect, then write it again with the events you actually receive. The distance between those two drawings is the limitation memo. Legal teams in GB have used that memo in vendor questionnaires more often than they have used our pretty diagrams.
Do not “impute” missing days with last-click stories from the ad network. Those stories are a different product, with a different incentive. Lifecycle Analytics for Mobile Users should stay on first-party events you can explain in a seminar without lowering your voice.
If your SDK cannot tell consented from non-consented traffic, stop drawing week-four curves until that flag exists. We have paused more than one Lifecycle Charter review for this reason. The pause is cheaper than a confident chart that cannot survive a regulator’s question or a journalist’s.