The Basics
Under the GDPR regulations, if individuals wish to have all their data deleted from your database, they may simply wish to not be contacted by your organization, or they may be exercising their "Right to be forgotten". It is important to understand what the individual's wishes are. In 99% of cases, the individual will likely wish not to be contacted by your organization. In each case, you can either make sure their data is deleted completely from the system, or you can de-identify/pseudonymize the contact or “hash” the contact, so that there is no way for them to be accidentally re-added into your system and the system knows to not let individuals contact them. This can be achieved in Beamery through hashing/pseudonymization. The customer needs to decide whether they want to delete the contacts data in its entirety and run the risk of adding the individual back to the Beamery system. Alternatively they can hash the data so they can comply with the individuals wishes. We find this acceptable practice under GDPR to ensure an individual's requests have the functional ability to be complied with.
When a contact is hashed, most of their data is deleted from the Beamery database. Beamery retains the following data points upon anonymization:
| Data Retained in Order to Prevent Re-adding the Same Contact in the Future | System Metadata (not PII) |
|---|---|
| 'firstName' | 'archivedAt' |
| 'lastName' | 'updatedAt' |
| 'middleNames' | 'assignedTo' |
| 'fullName' | 'status' |
| 'emails' | 'creationSource' |
| 'primaryEmail' | 'createdAt' |
| 'links' | 'mergedWith' |
| 'integrations' | 'mergedIn |
| 'phoneNumbers' | 'doNotCampaign' |
| 'primaryPhoneNumber' | 'confidential' |
| 'confidentiality' | |
| 'version' |
Note: Only Super Admins, Sourcing Admins, and Marketing Admins can hash contacts.
In this article we will cover how to hash a contact manually. To learn how to automatically hash contacts via automation, click here.
Anonymizing a Contact Profile
Start by navigating to the contact profile you wish to hash. You can use filters in the People grid or search for a specific contact.
Once you have located the contact profile, click on the vertical ellipses in the top right corner of the profile to expand the profile options. Then choose Data privacy settings.
This will bring up the Data Privacy Settings window where you can choose how you wish to store this contact's data. To hash a contact, choose Anonymized on this screen and then click Save.
The contact will be removed from the "People Grid" and will no longer be searchable. You will only see the profile if attempting to manually re-add the contact into Beamery - at which time you will be redirected to the hashed version of the profile.
You will also be redirected to the same hashed profile if you have the contact’s Beamery profile URL. The profile is still accessible via the URL in case a contact has been hashed accidentally (or if the contact has requested to be contacted again) and you need to re-identify them.
Who can Hash Contacts?
Only users with Super Admin, Sourcing Admin and Marketing Admin access can hash contacts.
Re-Identifying Contacts
Only Super Admins can re-Identify contacts.
If a user with permissions lower than Super Admin wishes to re-Identify a contact, they will need to contact the Super Admin to perform this action. Alternatively, a form can be sent to the candidate asking them to sign up (read more about how you can do this in the section on Existing Candidates within this article), which will override their previous de-identification.
To protect against accidental re-Identification, only Super Admins can perform this action by selecting the ‘Un-anonymize’ option at the center of the profile. If other users need to re-Identify a contact, they will need to contact the Super Admin to perform this action.
Re-Identifying the contact will bring back a clean profile containing only the name, email address, and social URLs. You’ll see an activity card detailing the period that the contact was previously de-identified. If you have a connected email, you’ll also see the message activity cards in the profile. Although we sync with your inbox, we won’t delete your personal messages.
Finally, you’ll see the previous campaigns that the contact was in to provide context on the communication they had received from you - in case this may be what led to them exercising their right to be forgotten/unsubscribe.