In the Contact Manager you have the ability to identify any piece of data that is sent via CSV (Email bridge, SFTP, directly uploaded to Contact Manager) or API to trustMinder. 


Once a piece of data is identified as PII and the retention period is set, the PII data is stored in a separate collection/documents and avails of the underlying database technology to automatically delete the data once the retention period expires. 


We rely on the database for the following reasons:

- Automated Data Deletion: Documents are automatically removed once their `expireAt` timestamp is reached, ensuring compliance with data retention policies and reducing manual intervention
- Improved Security: By automatically expiring sensitive PII, it minimises the risk of unauthorised access or breaches
- Compliance: Helps adhere to regulations like GDPR by ensuring timely deletion of sensitive data.


1. Selecting PII

You can select Contact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data on the platform.

Contact PII data could be an email address, a mobile number, an address, a name or anything that you as a business classify as PII.  

If you require guidance on what is PII - please refer to the EU Guide of what is considered Personal Data . 

You can add as many as your require but please note if you add a PII classification, it will only apply it going forward. It will not retrospectively apply it. If you need to apply it retrospectively please raise a support ticket. 



Example 

Let's use 'name' as the piece of PII. 

If trustMinder receives data via CSV and the CSV file has a column header 'name' any data in this column will be identified as PII and will be deleted automatically after the retention period. Same applies for an API call, if 'name' is in the contact object, it will be treated as PII and will be automatically deleted.


You may have other Contact PII and you can set them here. Contact PII set here will NOT be stored with the survey. This ensures that the Campaign Data is kept anonymous at the same time allows non-personal data to be used in the Insight Manager.


2. Retention

We have retention periods for three items: 


  1. Contacts in the Contact Manager:  This is contact information stored in the Contact Manager. This specifies the number of days since you last sent a message to this contact before the contact is deleted from the contact manager along with all PII identified in the first step.
  2. Contact Files: If you transfer a file to the platform (email bridge/SFTP) it is stored encrypted at rest as a file. Once the retention period is up, the file is deleted.
  3. Campaign Data: Setting this retention period will delete the survey response / historical data / SMS from the platform. Typically, this does not have an expiration data. 


A guide to setting these retention periods: 

- Contacts Manager: Keep this contact data as long as you need it on the platform. The shorter the better.

- Contact Files: We only need to process the file when we receive it - we don't need it after this. We recommend only having a couple of days (e.g. 10) as the retention period.

- Campaign Data: We recommend keeping this data forever. It's completely anonymous and can be used for trend/historical analysis in the Insight manager. 



Depending on your account setup, you may notice you won't be able to set the retention period directly - this will be done by the System Administrator. 


You can create a support ticket for these values to be set.