Ensure your data minimization practices with our new feature, Data Purges

Today we’re introducing Data Purges — a new way to protect the privacy and security of your customers’ data.

Businesses are increasingly aware that the privacy and security of their customer data is important. They put safeguards in place to comply with regulations and to protect personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or generally sensitive information about their customers. But one key and often underemphasized component of data privacy and security is data minimization.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established seven principles that many companies use as a framework for their own data privacy programs. Data minimization is one of them. 

Data minimization is the principle that any organization collecting personal data should be deliberate about the data they collect and only collect what is needed to provide their product or service. Not collecting extra customer data “just in case”. Not stockpiling historic data in hopes it might be useful for something else in the future. Data minimization also means deleting data that’s no longer needed.

In the age of big data, many organizations now have innumerable opportunities to easily collect data about their users, and, in some cases, it was standard to store this data indefinitely. This standard has changed. As privacy legislation continues to evolve, having a sound approach to data minimization is key.

Announcing Data Purges

Good data doesn’t just mean high-quality, complete, and actionable data. It also means ensuring the privacy and security of the personal data of your customers and making sure every vendor that touches your customer data does too. We understand that our stance and policies toward data privacy and security can have real-world impacts on your business. We work hard to develop and adhere to responsible and respectful data privacy and security standards at Twilio Segment.

To help you better ensure the privacy and security of your customers’ data and practice data minimization, we are happy to announce that Twilio Segment now offers data purge functionality. Data purges let Twilio Segment customers, current and former, completely purge all their customer data from our systems.

You can initiate a data purge by navigating to your workspace settings in the Twilio Segment app…

… Clicking the “Delete Workspace” button …

… Confirming that you want to delete your workspace and all customer data in it … 

… and deleting your workspace.

When a data purge is initiated, all customer data associated with your workspace will be purged from all of Twilio Segment’s internal data stores within 30 days. Please be aware that data purges are for Twilio Segment data stores only and these deletions are not forwarded to your connected destination tools. 

Even if you delete your workspace and purge all of your data from Twilio Segment systems, you may still need to make additional deletion requests with your destination vendors.

If you deleted your workspace before March 31st, 2022, and would like to ensure that your old workspace’s data has been purged, you can send us a request at friends@segment.com with your workspace slug, and a member of our team will respond to help. 

Twilio Segment helps you be proactive about data privacy and security

In addition to data purges, Twilio Segment offers several features to help you take a proactive approach to data privacy and security. Some features such as Protocols, Destination Functions, Destination Filters, and Warehouse Selective Sync, help you minimize the data you collect through transformations and filtering. Other features are more comprehensive and address specific data privacy and security needs.

User Deletion & Suppression

We provide you mechanisms to comply with the end user’s Right to be Forgotten and Right to Object under GDPR and CCPA by offering User Deletion and Suppression. If a customer chooses to revoke or alter their consent to data collection, you can use our deletion and suppression APIs to block ongoing data collection about a user. In addition, you can delete all historical data about them across Twilio Segment systems, send delete messages to all connected raw data sources, and forward deletion requests to a growing number of supported tools downstream.

Privacy Portal

We introduced Privacy Portal in 2019. It assists you in your compliance with GDPR and CCPA by offering tools for creating and maintaining a comprehensive data inventory. The data inventory allows you to create a centralized repository of all the properties you collect and classifies them by risk from low to high. Customers can also monitor changes to the inventory with real-time alerts and enforce standard privacy controls.

Twilio Segment in the EU

In January 2022, we launched Twilio Segment in the EU. It gives you Connections, Protocols, and Personas with data ingestion, processing, storage, and audience creation done on infrastructure hosted in the EU. It makes it easy to collect, unify, and activate your customer data in any system where you need it while helping protect the data privacy of end users in the EU by giving you the control to keep your customers’ data in the EU.

Ensuring the privacy and security of your customer data is crucial. Twilio Segment is here to help.

Ensuring the privacy and security of your customers’ data is not just an item to check off a list, it also helps you earn and maintain their trust. Wherever you’re at in your data privacy and security efforts, Twilio Segment is here to help. We strive to be proactive, transparent, and reliable about our data privacy and security solutions. We do everything we can to be trustworthy partners for your business. We are committed to providing the tools and controls to help keep your customer data private and secure.