It is essential to highlight that the GDPR guideline only applies to Controllers & Processors which are firms operating in the European Union (EU) and companies outside the EU that provide products or services to people living in the EU. GDPR does not apply to individuals who are citizens of the United States of America, Canada, or any other country outside of the EU.
However, regardless of their citizenship, most organizations will respect their clients' wishes to have their data erased to avoid any uncertainty. As a Data Controller under GDPR, you must erase every client record from every system under your control in response to your customers' request for data erasure. It includes any information you keep about the customer on your internal systems and any external systems you oversee.
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Please Note: Help articles have been updated to reflect the new contact management process. If this hasn't been rolled out to your account yet, it will be in the coming weeks. See our
Exercising the Right to Erasure (Legacy) article to learn more.
In this Article
Deleting an Individual Contact
You can delete a contact by accessing the contact lists in the Audience menu or by quickly navigating to them using the Contact Search dashboard widget.
Upon entering the contact details and clicking submit, the contact details page will appear. Click the options menu and select Delete Contact.
Alternatively, visit the Contacts section from the Navigation panel and search for a contact to be deleted. Then, click on the Actions menu next to the contact name and click on Delete Contact.
When you delete the contact, its record will remain for reporting purposes. The following data erasure procedures will also take place:
- The contact will be unsubscribed from all previously subscribed lists.
- If the contact is present within any Journey, it will be unsubscribed.
- The contact's UID, email address, and phone number will be replaced with a pseudonymized one and added to the general Do Not Mail & SMS list and the Brand Do Not Mail & SMS list (if your account uses the Brand Management feature).
- The contact's email address will be replaced by its pseudonymized version if it was previously on the general Do Not Mail and/or the Brand Do Not Mail list.
- The contact's phone number will be replaced by its pseudonymized version if it was previously in the general Do Not SMS and/or the Brand Do Not SMS list.
- The contact record's custom fields will be deleted.
- The contact record's standard fields (first name, last name, telephone, and fax) will be set to NULL.
- All records in any relational table relating to that contact will be deleted.
Deleting Contacts in Bulk
Maropost Marketing Cloud gives you the option to bulk delete contacts from your accounts with a few simple steps. This proves handy whenever you receive data erasure requests from multiple clients and would like to remove these contacts all at the same time.
- To access this option, click on your username and select Settings.
- Now, under Contacts, select the Bulk Delete Contacts tab.
- Click on the Import link.
- From the modal window that opens, upload your file (CSV and TXT format only) containing the email addresses of users that you need to delete. Select the delimiter and column rows in which the email addresses are present so that the system can identify and process them. Finally, click on Import.
The email addresses imported from the file will be processed and deleted permanently from your Marketing Cloud account.