GDPR Customer Communication
Information regarding GDPR and Acoustic Campaign
With General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in effect, we have a few items that we would like to bring to your attention.
Storage of Archived Files
A previous communication dated November 3, 2017 outlined our plans related to GDPR for Acoustic Campaign. This included an item concerning a new 30 day limit on storage of off-lined/archived files.
In preparation for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Acoustic has been evaluating our storage of customer data. Our revised strategy for storing Archived Data assures that we are not unnecessarily storing personal data for longer than it is needed, and also help us to respond to Right to Erasure requests from our customers on behalf of their data subjects.
As you may be aware, the Acoustic Campaign product has processes for removing older, unused entities from our database and ‘archiving it’ as files.
IMPORTANT: We are not changing your ability to determine when unused entities are off-lined. You can still set those values up to 450 days. What will change, is that after an email or database is off-lined, you will only have 30 days to download it before it is removed entirely.
What is changing?
- Unused databases: after 'x' days (configurable) of inactivity, Acoustic Campaign currently exports the database to a CSV and removes the database from Database listings. This will continue, but you will only have 30 days to download the CSV once it has been created.
- Daily archiving of contacts in Transact databases: 'x' days (configurable) after the contact was added to the database, they are purged and written to a file. This will continue but you will only have 30 days to download the CSV once it has been created.
- Email off-lining: after 450 days (default) we build a zip file with the content bodies and all associated behaviors (e.g. clicks, opens). These files will no longer be created. These behaviors are available anytime within 450 days via the Raw Recipient Data Export processes.
- Resources > Archive Activity: Shows databases/contact sources and emails that were archived in the last 30 days or those that will be archived in the next 30 days.
- Databases: Databases that have been archived are viewable in the Archive tab in Data > Database > View Data.
- Emails: Emails that have been archived (if enabled) are viewable in the Archive tab in Content > View Mailings > Archived Mailings.
- Contacts: Contacts that have been archived (if enabled) are viewable in the associated items, Contacts Archived.
Cleanup of unused data
We would like to take this opportunity to suggest you clean up any unnecessary databases you may have. Should you need to handle GDPR requests for your data subjects, it will be much easier if you do not need to search across databases you no longer use. As a reminder, purge and merge processes in Acoustic Campaign create additional databases; if you do not need those, they would be good candidates for deletion.
Data subject access requests
We recently added some functionality to support your staff when you receive Right to Erasure or Right of Access requests from your data subjects.
We are also adding functionality (targeted for mid-June), that will allow you to initiate these processes via the Acoustic Campaign user interface. GDPR allows 30 days to respond to Data Subject Access Requests providing a few options:
- You could accumulate any requests you receive and process them in batch when our UI functionality is available in June.
- In the interim, you could use a tool such as Postman to execute the API requests manually.
For any other specific questions or concerns, please open a case by visiting the Acoustic Campaign Support Portal or by calling us via the Support toll free numbers listed below:
- US toll free: 844 853 8583
- UK toll free: 0800 032 7995
- Germany toll free: 0800 723 7225
- Belgium toll free: 0800 81 670
- Australia toll free: 1800 677 328
- All other countries: 1 919 864 3550