De-identifying data after a period of time | XM Community
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Hi there,
I'm building a survey where I need to collect respondents' names temporarily. After the data collection part of the study is over, I would like to permanently delete the participants' names because we no longer need them. Is there a way to do this in Qualtrics? Something like deleting the responses to a particular question after a period of time? Ideally I do not want to download the data and delete it manually on my computer.

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/23744/de-identifying-data-after-a-period-of-timeYou can do this by running update response API in loop where you update the demographics by a blank or static text, on all survey responses.
It is a bit manual at the start but can be done.
Hope it helps!


Thank you Deepak! That sounds like it might work for me. Will that permanently delete the original responses everywhere? I'm not too familiar with how Qualtrics stores data, sorry.


https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54742#Comment_54742Yes, it will


https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54731#Comment_54731Thank you -- Another follow-up question:
What if I wanted to replace the names with unique # identifiers? I'll have paired samples (two separate Qualtrics survey forms) and I need to be able to match the pairs without names. Is there a way to do this, or would it be too complicated? I am not familiar with the Qualtrics API.


https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54742#Comment_54742Yes, it will be too complicated to do this you will have to have it as a static dataset and pull the information from there before triggering the API.


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