Cleaning Personal Data

To assist you with data security and GDPR compliance, you can remove personal data (PII), for example names and email addresses, from surveys. This will allow you to anonymize the data once the personal details are no longer needed, for example when data collection is finished on a project and there is no further requirement for emailing invitations and reminders.

You can also perform partial cleaning of records that are older than a given number of days. This can be useful for a continuous survey (tracker) as it allows you to clean the personal data from old data records (for example older than 60 days), and leave the personal data on more recent records. By specifying the "Only records older than X days" limit on the task, the system will overwrite personal data in the respondent table that has a created_date more than X days in the past, and overwrite personal data in the response data that has an interview_start date more than X days in the past.

You can set the task to be recurring so that for example every week it will remove personal data that is older than 60 days from a particular project.

Note: If the survey is linked to a panel, the panelistid will also be cleaned from the dataset. It will then no longer be possible to join with personal data in the panel database. Similarly, if the survey is linked to a contact database the contactid will be cleaned, as will the respid in the survey activity loop table in the contact database.

Warning:
This action is irreversible!

1. To access the functionality, go to the Survey Data > Personal Data (PII) Cleaning menu - .



Figure 1 - Accessing the Personal Data Cleaning menu

The Personal Data Cleaning dialog opens - .



Figure 2 - The Personal Data Cleaning dialog

2. In the Variables to clean... field, provide a comma-separated list of the field names that are to be cleaned (overwritten).

When running the task, these variables (if found) will be cleaned in both respondent data and survey data.

3. If you wish to remove only data that is older than a specified number of days, type the required number into the Only records older... field.
4. If you wish to make the task recurring, click into the Start Time field and select Recurring. Additional fields will then appear; set the task to run as required.