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            Data Deletion for the Salesforce Platform

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            Data Deletion for the Salesforce Platform

            You can delete customer data to comply with data protection and privacy regulations. These common requests and tips may help you determine how you might use Salesforce Platform features to work toward compliance with the regulations that apply to you.

            Required Editions

            Available in: All Editions

            Many data protection and privacy regulations can require you and your company to delete customers’ personal data when customers request it, or when it’s no longer necessary for you to keep it. We’ve listed a few of the regulations that are important to many companies collecting and processing their customers’ data.

            • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Union
            • Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), Japan
            • Privacy Act, Australia

            If you have customers or users who want the data that you’ve collected on them deleted, review these common requests and the procedures related to them. You can also review considerations in other sections of this guide for Salesforce products that may use the Salesforce Platform.

            Common Customer RequestActions to ConsiderThings to Consider
            I’ve deleted sensitive data from my Production org, and now I want to delete that same data from my Full Copy Sandbox. Refresh Your Sandbox You can manually delete the data from your sandbox. If you choose to refresh your sandbox to duplicate your production org, check with your development teams first. Otherwise, work may be lost. Also remove the data from any data sets that you’ve created for development and testing.
            An employee’s left our company. I need remove their access to my org and delete all data associated with their login credentials.

            In addition to removing the user’s org access, consider:

            • Expiring all passwords for that user
            • Revoking activation status
            • End usage tracking for Connected Apps
            • Remove user sessions

            Users and admins can also:

            • Disconnect the user’s account from third-party accounts like Facebook
            • Change the user’s password
            I'm an ISV and I want to be sure that some data is removed from package versions I published.

            To remove data from package versions,

            1. Create a version of the package with the information removed
            2. Use the existing push upgrade option to update all their customers to the new version of the package
            3. To delete the original package version, file a ticket with Salesforce
            		  
            I want to find and delete data associated with a particular contact ID.
            • Find information with reports
            • Build a flow that accepts a contact ID, finds all data associated with that contact ID, and deletes it. Learn how to build a flow.
            		 Flows might not identify all the data to delete. After your flow finishes, consider running a report to identify any remaining information and then delete it.
            As a customer, I want to delete Event Monitoring data for a given user on request.

            Event Monitoring logs are treated as a single entity, which means you can't remove one single user's data from a log. Pinpoint the dates of the user's activity you want to delete. Then remove the logs in that date range.

            If you want to retain some data from these logs, you can make backups of logs before deleting them. Then, after you delete a log, remove specific users’ data from your backups. Learn more about managing log files in the Event Monitoring Trailhead.
            I'd like to delete a user's history programmatically. Can I do that?
            • Delete custom big objects through Setup.
            • Use the deleteByExample( ) call to define an sObject that contains the fields and values you want to delete.
            		 The deleteByExample( ) call can delete data in FieldHistoryArchive and custom big objects. Entire custom big objects can be deleted in Setup.
            I want to let Community or Chatter users deactivate their own accounts on demand. Provide users with a mechanism to deactivate their accounts. You can create this mechanism declaratively or programmatically.
            A customer referenced in my flows asked us to delete all information about them. How can I make sure I've deleted all references to information that could personally identify this customer?
            • Manually remove the customer’s records from the flow.
            • Use the $Flow.InterviewGuid variable to identify records that are saved when a flow is paused.
            		 When a flow is paused, the flow interviews serialize the data that the flow references. The serialized data is saved to the database as a Paused Flow Interview record. After you find these records, you can delete them as you would any other record.
            I want to delete a user and all the records associated with them.
            • Manually or programmatically delete the values in non-required fields.
            • Anonymize data in required fields. For example, change an email address to “deleteduser@delete.myco.com.”
            • Deactivate the User record by unchecking the Active field.
            • Delete any third-party account links used for authentication.
            • When deleting information about employees, the employee should ask Salesforce Customer Support to re-enable the default email change verification settings. This setting prevents them from receiving verification emails if you anonymize their data in required fields. Customers don’t receive verification emails, and don’t need to contact Salesforce Customer Support.
            • Consider using Quick Actions to find information about customers like Customer Community or External Identity users. Go to the Contact record, choose to disable the user through the Quick Action, find the disabled User record, and then manually delete remaining values.
            I’m a developer, and I created an app that uses the Einstein Vision and Einstein Language APIs. A user of my app has requested that any personal data in the form of text or images be removed from any elements created by the API (such as examples, datasets, and models).

            After you delete the relevant data, use the Einstein Vision and Einstein Language APIs to delete the dataset. Then create anew dataset from the source data and consider whether to retrain the dataset to create a model.

            		  
            Some customers requested that we delete text or image data sent in for prediction. Prediction data is deleted automatically within 48 hours.  
            I want to delete my reaction to an Einstein Next Best Action recommendation. To delete customer reactions, use Next Best Action, Reaction via Connect REST API.  
             
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