Purging and purge requests

Hi all,

We are a nonprofit in Connecticut. We had an email request come in recently asking for us to delete their information under the Connecticut Data Privacy law. As a nonprofit, we are exempt from the law, but I processed the request anyway, as a show of good faith. This got me thinking about best practices, documentation, and so forth.

In such cases, what are your org's best practices? Is there a check and balance on purge scheduling/running? Is there documentation before and/or after? I'm curious what y'all have in place.

  • This makes me wonder if other states have exemptions for non-profits!  Probably not my state (NY), but maybe others...  hmm...
    But regarding your actual question - we normally only purge if there's a specific request to, and documentation is basically an email trail (request from patron goes to our box office, who asks me to do the honors and report back)

  • We also only purge if there is a request to do so. A customer will usually email one of our teams and those teams then submit a Mojo ticket request for us. In our ticketing portal we assign a specific tag to that ticket to keep track of all purge requests.

  • Usually, people ask us to take them off our mailing list, and we handle that with mail restrictions (and/or phone, email, depending on the request). I've had only a few "erase my data" requests, and in all but one case, these were people we mailed to through a list trade, so other than contacting the creator of the list to request that we don't receive that name again, there's not much I can do. For the one purge request I've acted on, I first copied the directive to purge data into a customer service issue. That's the only documentation I have.

  • Kia ora Nathanael. We purge records in 2 instances - one, as everyone has said, upon a request from a customer & secondly, around accounts created during guest check out, if the customer doesn't complete the sale. We feel that if someone enters their details into TNEW & then doesn't complete the transaction, they would have a reasonable expectation that we would not be keeping their data - so it's a weekly maintenance job for me. I identify the records created during a partial guest check out & then purge them. No other documentation completed each week - just the  weekly maintenance process documented.