Deleting and or Anonymizing user data

Users must be able to remove themselves from your site. This process should be as automatic and easy as possible. That’s why we have a few request forms that you can place throughout your pages to help users make those requests.

You can use the PHP function gdpr_request_form('delete') or the shortcode [gdpr_request_form type="delete"] to display the form.

After the user submits the form they will receive a confirmation email. On confirmation, we analyze this user data to see if they published any content on the site, whether it be a post or comment.

If they haven’t published any content, they will be deleted from the site and get a confirmation email saying that all their data has been erased.

In case they have published posts or comments, they will be added to a review table on the dashboard. You can see this by navigating to GDPR -> Requests -> Erasure tab.

On this table, you can review all of the user’s posts and comments. You can then choose to reassign the content to an admin or you can anonymize their comments. Anonymizing comments will remove their name, picture and even IP address from the comment but it will leave the comment message.

After you have anonymized or reassigned everything you needed, you can safely click on delete and that user will be removed from the site.

You as an admin also have the power to manually add a user to the erasure table. All you need to do is to navigate to GDPR -> Requests -> Erasure tab and input the user’s email into the lookup box. This is in case a user requests to be removed using other channels of communication or you only want to anonymize their comments. Doing it this way will only add the user to the table, not delete it if there is no content associated with the user.

IMPORTANT!

Don’t forget that if you are using third-party systems like Disqus or Mailchimp you need to manually remove the user from there or you can use one of our extensions.

Please be aware that if you are not using any of our extensions we can’t stop the user from being automatically deleted because the plugin will not know that their data is on a third-party server.