How can Snowflake tagging be used for data governance and controlling access to personally identifiable information?

Snowflake’s tagging feature lets you attach metadata to databases, schemas, tables, columns, and even individual rows. In a data‑governance context, you can tag objects with labels such as ‘PII’, ‘Confidential’, or ‘Public’. These tags can then be referenced in role‑based access control (RBAC) policies. For example, you can create a role that has SELECT privileges only on objects tagged ‘Public’ and deny access to objects tagged ‘PII’. Snowflake also supports dynamic data masking, which can be driven by tags to mask sensitive columns for certain roles. Additionally, tags can be used in audit logs to track who accessed what data, enabling compliance reporting. By centralizing governance rules in tags, you avoid hard‑coding permissions per table and can easily update policies as data evolves. This approach scales well in large organizations like Cargill, where data ownership and privacy requirements vary across departments.