Deleting Contacts & Anonymize Corresponding Responses

Hi,
Within the UI, you should be able to achieve this by replacing the value of the fields you want to anonymize by an empty or dummy value (like XXXXX).

• Survey project


• Data and analysis tab


• Select all responses, then modify the selected ones.

https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/comment/36606#Comment_36606Hey ALAFLEUR,
thanks for that. I just discovered this as well. Is it possible to update multiple fields on the response with one API call? Or do you need one API call per field?
The issue then is maybe also that you need to do this for all responses which the contact gave (for multiple surveys). So you need to identify the surveys and responses first and then update one by one...

I'm not the IT guy who configured this, but I'm pretty sure 1 API call can update multiple fields.
Are you trying to achieve this for a single contact of for all your contacts and surveys?

https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/comment/36608#Comment_36608Hey ALAFLEUR,
no, only for one contact. So e.g. due to GDPR we need to delete/anonymize all contact information. This also affects the Qualtrics contact and the corresponding responses. We would fully delete the contact. However, we would like to keep the response data without the personal data. We would only keep general data (like city) for reporting purpose.
But I mean this is one approach to update everything with " " or whatever except of the general non-personal data we want to keep. I think you can clear all kind of fields (contact fields as well as embedded data fields).

Shouldn't you use the data privacy tab from the admin tab for this if it's only for one contact?

https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/comment/36610#Comment_36610Hey ALAFLEUR,
we don't store email addresses in Qualtrics. I also don't know if it would be possible to keep specific parts of the response with this approach. And furthermore, we need some automated way since we are trying to set up this process for a very huge company which has multiple deletion requests daily...
I guess I will go further with the approach to update response data via API.

I cleared (" ") the external data reference (our XM directory key) in the Data & Analysis UI. However, when checking the contacts transaction, I have still insight on the response. Is it possible to hide the response from the contact's transactional data (no reference between contact and survey response)?

Hi ​@chackbusch , thank you for still updating this topic after all this time!

I’m looking into anonymisation currently.

If I understand it correctly, there is actually no solution for your original requirement?

So deleting a specific contact’s data from the XM Directory, and anonymize that specific contact’s survey responses.

Because the standard anonymisation policy can only anonimize survey responses that are older than a certain #days. It cannot be used to anonymize survey responses of a specific individual.

And using the standard “Personal Data” request is also not covering the requirement, as that one fully deletes the survey responses of this person instead of only anonymizing them… (and we would not want to delete the survey responses as this would impact our historic scores on our dashboards).

And finally as you also stated, if you manually delete a contact from the directory, then nothing changes on the survey data. The survey data is not deleted, but not anonymized either. 

Hi ​@JoycaV. Sorry for the delayed response. Yeah, indeed. What you have described is also my understanding. I did find any other solution for my requirement so far. I will have a look an a new anonymization concept for our organization and maybe I will be more clever afterwards…