Our customers have a responsibility to ensure that they comply with all relevant legal, regulatory and contractual requirements in the collection, storage, retrieval and destruction of records. Of particular relevance is the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with their requirements concerning the storage, processing and management of personal data / personal information.
One important principle of Data Protection is ensuring personal data is only held for as long is as necessary. This reduces the volume of personal data under management, removes out-of-date and stale data and, in the event of a data breach, reduces the scale and impact on our customers and the data subjects / consumers themselves.
With this release, we are enhancing our automated data retention capabilities by supporting customizable retention periods per account and giving you greater insight into how long data is retained per experience.
Background
Until recently, data retention was fixed at 13 months after the time of entry. With this release, you will be able to specify a data retention period of up to 12 months.
What is changing?
- Customizable retention periods
- Multiple retention modes to support both short-term and evergreen experiences
- Publishing flow updates
- The console will now display retention information and guidance to help you understand data retention for each experience
Retention Periods
You can now choose one of the following retention periods for entries:
- 3 months
- 6 months
- 12 months (default)
The most suitable option will depend on your processing needs and corporate standards. By default, your account will be set to use a 12 months retention period.
Retention Period Changes
Changes to your account retention period can be requested by having an account Admin contact support here.
Please Note: All change requests will need to be evaluated as a number of technical reasons may impact your ability to decrease or increase the retention period. A change to your data retention period will only apply to new experiences, past experiences will keep the retention period they were originally configured with.
Retention Modes
The retention period will be based on one of the following:
- For campaigns without an expiry date, the date of entry (“rolling mode”)
This is perfect for evergreen campaigns where there an expiration date is undefined. - For campaigns with an expiry date, the date the campaign expires (“expiration mode”)
This is perfect for short-lived experiences such a competition that closes in 30 days. - Once a campaign is published, the mode is "locked in" for that campaign.
Note that when you reset an experience, the mode will be unlocked.
Publishing flow updates
Key changes to publishing are:
- Experiences may be set to publish up to 12 months in advance
- Experiences may expire no more than 12 months from date of publishing
Note that you can now easily publish and schedule experiences with or without an expiration date, something that was previously restricted. So, for those experiences where you intend to leave them running and don't have an expiration date in mind, we'll treat them as evergreen automatically and set rolling mode for you. When you publish an experience with an expiration date, we'll recognize them as a time-limited experience and retain the data for your chosen period after expiration.
Updates to the UI
You will now be notified about the retention period and the retention mode on the following screens:
- Experience Summary
- Publishing (before confirming the final step)
- Entries
- Export
- When rescheduling experiences
The console will guide you through any restrictions or important information to remember. You may see messages such as:
- “Entries will be retained for 12 months from the date of entry.” (rolling retention)
- “Entries will be retained until <retention date>.” (expiration-based retention)
Key things to remember
- Admin users in your account can request a change to the account retention period by contacting support here.
- Retention mode is set at the point of publishing and will be either rolling (if no expiration date is set) or expiration-based (when an expiration date is set)
- Entries will be removed 3/6/12 months from the time of entry when an experience is in rolling mode
- Entries will be removed 3/6/12 months from the expiration date when an experience is in the expiry-based mode
- There are no restrictions when trying to reschedule an experience in rolling mode
- There are some restrictions when trying to reschedule an experience in expiration-based mode but the UI will guide you through these
- To reset the experience’s retention mode, you will need to reset the experience. Please note that this action will remove all existing entries and insights
If you have any questions about Enhanced Data Retention, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact our Support team.
