Redacting (X out) personal data for an individual

Individuals can ask your company to redact their personal information from your database. After the legal retention period for preserving the data records has passed, you can manually delete some records from your system, and run the Privacy Utility to X-out other personal data about the individual so that it can no longer be viewed.

See About the Privacy Utility to determine which records can be handled by the Privacy Utility, and which must be removed manually.

In many areas of the system, the user information cannot simply be deleted, because it is related to transactions or records that must be maintained for auditing and historical purposes. The Privacy Utility allows you to X-out the personal data. For example, the person's name and address are replaced by X's in the database. Date fields that contain personal data, such as a birth date, are set to a null value. The key fields in each database table, such as the vendor or customer number, are not X-ed out. To prevent validation errors, on the Customers and Prospects forms, the country is not X-ed out, and the tax code, if originally set to an external tax code, is cleared.

Note: These changes cannot be reversed after the utility is run.

To use the Privacy Utility to X-out personal data for an individual:

Note: You must be set up on the Electronic Signature Authorizers form in order to X-out data in this utility.
  1. Open the Privacy Utility form.
  2. Specify the individual's name, and optionally the country to narrow the search results.
    You can specify part of a name to display any instances that contain the partial name. For example, if you enter Rob, the results display names such as Robertson, Robert, Wrobinski, and Rob, when searching the name and company fields.

    In some cases, for example in applicant records, the country is not applicable.

  3. Specify the Data Groups to search in the database.
    See About the Privacy Utility for more details about the types of information in each group.
  4. Click Search.
    The grid displays the records that were found. Each record indicates the data group where the record was found, and the name that was found. Where available, country and address information is displayed to further distinguish the individual.
  5. Select the Select check box for each record that you want to X-out.
  6. Click X-out to X-out personal data in all of the selected records.
  7. If required, the Electronic Signature Required window is displayed. Specify your user name and password, select the appropriate reason code for printing, and click OK.
    The personal data is X-d out.

    A log is updated each time that the utility is used, for auditing purposes. You can print the log from the Electronic Signature Records Report.