Data management - Anonymization & Retention

To guarantee data security and to minimize the risk of data losses, you can choose to have an Anonymization and Retention period within your environment.

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. What is it?
1. Anonymization
2. Retention
2. Process

1. What is it?

a. Anonymization

It is possible that after a certain period of time, you do not need the personal information of your participants anymore. If that's the case, it's safer to remove the personal information of your participants from the Hello Customer database.

Personal information includes:

• First name
• Last name
• E-mail address
• Phone number
• Customer ID

We do keep the encrypted e-mail address of unsubscribed people in our database to make sure they do not receive any e-mail invitations in the future. It is not possible to decrypt the e-mail address, but if the same e-mail address is uploaded, it will get the same encryption so the system knows this person is unsubscribed.

b. Retention

If you do not need the data to be present in Hello Customer after a certain period of time (for example: after 5 years), we recommend to set a retention period. The retention period is actually the time we keep the data in our database. So if you have a retention period of 5 years, we will keep the data for 5 years and afterwards, everything will be deleted from our database.

After the retention period, following data is removed from our database:

• All participant information
• All metadata linked to the participant upload
• All answers given by the participant
• Anything else related to the upload of the participant

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2. Process

Step 1: Inform your customer success manager or send an e-mail to support@hellocustomer.com to let us know you want to activate the anonymization and / or retention period.

• The minimum period for anonymization is 1 month.
• The minimum period for retention is 1 year.

Keep in mind that your anonymization period always needs to be shorter than the retention period, since it's impossible to anonymize data that was already removed from our database.

Step 2: Every first day of the month, the process to anonymize and remove data from our database is started. The system checks all data:

• everything older than the anonymization period will be anonymized in the database, e.g. all personal information linked to these participants will be removed.
• everything older than the retention period will be removed from the database.

Example:

• Settings:
  • Anonymization = 1 month
  • Retention = 1 year
• 1/4/2024
  • For all participants added to the platform until 29/2/2024 the personal data will be removed from the database.
  • All answers, metadata related to an answer, etc. will be removed for participants that were added to the platform until 31/3/2023

In the platform, this means:

• All data until 29/2/2024 is shown as anonymous in the conversations and the side panel of analysis and dashboards.
• All answers until 31/3/2023 are removed for the platform. You will not be able to find them in conversations, they are not shown on the homepage, in dashboards, analysis, team ranking, e-mail stats, etc. In short, it will look like they have never been there.

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