Data Provenance

Once a dataset has passed through a few hands, versions, and vendors, it gets hard to answer a simple question: where did this specific sample actually come from, and what happened to it along the way. Data provenance is the record that answers that, tracking a sample's origin, consent status, and every transformation it went through before landing in a training set. Without it, an audit or a compliance review has nothing to point to beyond "we think this is fine."