Mass Deleting Individual and Related Records with Data Quality Helper

GDPR and the Right to be Forgotten

Whether you are required to be compliant with the European Union law on data protection and privacy (General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), other privacy protection laws such as The California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA), you would like your company to get ahead of the curve with respect to privacy acts as a best practice, or have a client that does, Salesforce has implemented an Individual object to help you keep track of an individual’s data privacy preferences.

Customizing and using the Individual object according to your business will help you on your journey to honor your customer’s wishes regarding how their data is stored and used, and when it needs to be deleted. The Right to be Forgotten applies when a customer no longer wishes for you to retain data about them, you no longer have a legal basis for processing, or when it’s no longer necessary to keep their data.

One person (Individual) may have multiple records within your Salesforce instance that contain personal data such as Leads, Contacts, Person Accounts, or User. An efficient method is needed to find and delete the Individual and/or all of its related records.

Tip: Set up your org for success. Ensure that all of the person’s Lead, Contact, Person Account, or User records are related to the Individual record by automatically relating them with Lookup Helper.

There are a number of ways to delete data from Salesforce, some of them have their limitations and some are more difficult to use than others. Using Data Quality Helper is an easy, safe way to mass delete records tied to an individual.

Let’s walk through deleting Individual records and/or their associated Lead and Contact records.

Before you get started, it is a good idea to determine the criteria that Data Quality Helper should use for record deletion. In this use case, we will be using the “Forget this Individual” field flagged true as the only criteria. Checking this flag could be accomplished in a number of ways, including using Rollup Helper to rollup the checkbox from Leads, Contacts, or other child records that meet the requirements you define.

Deleting Individual and Related Records with Data Quality Helper

Part 1: Create a New Storage Recycle Job

1. OBJECT: Individual
2. HARD DELETE: check to bypass sending records to the Recycle Bin.*
3. CHILD OBJECTS: select related objects that contain records to also delete (Lead shown in example)
4. FILTER. Field: Forget this Individual. Logic: equals. Condition: True.
5. Save.

* Hard Delete: Leaving the flag unchecked may be the safer option in case you have incorrect criteria. Note for compliance, after verification that the correct records were deleted, you will need to empty the Recycle Bin to completely remove the data from your org. The Recycle Bin’s capacity is limited, so it's possible to delete more records than your Recycle Bin can hold. 

Part 2: Safety Net

1. “Preview Records” to verify filter criteria will produce the desired results.

2. Separately, a backup solution could be used as well, and then the backup files can be deleted after confirmation that the correct records were deleted.

Part 3: Execute

Once the deletion criteria is verified and the appropriate backups are in place, activate the job: sidebar Detail tab>Edit>Active>Save.

Running Storage Recycle Jobs:

• The “Run” button will manually start the deletion process.
• Optionally, to automate a regular deletion process, select a run mode to execute the Active jobs on either a defined schedule or after Salesforce Data Backups.

Deleting Related Child Records Only and Keeping Individual

Create “New Storage Recycle Job.”

1. OBJECT: such as Lead, Contact.
2. HARD DELETE: check to bypass sending records to the Recycle Bin.* (see note above)
3. FILTER. Field: Individual>Forget this Individual. Logic: equals. Condition: True.
4. Save.
5. Follow Part 2: Safety net and Part 3: Execute above.

Walkthrough

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