Anonymize one or more customers in your database

What is anonymization? Anonymization consists of permanently deleting from your site's database all personal information belonging to a customer, which is then replaced by anonymous data. Once a customer has been anonymized, it becomes impossible to identify the account holder, whether by name, email address, phone number or postal address. Anonymization is one of the obligations arising from the European GDPR regulation. Several anonymization measures are available:

• automatically anonymize all your inactive customers.
• manually anonymize all your inactive customers.
• anonymize a specific customer from their customer profile.

What is an inactive customer? For the scheduled task to anonymize a customer, they must be considered inactive by the system. To qualify, they must meet two conditions simultaneously — one related to login and one related to rentals:

Examples based on an anonymization delay configured at 6 months and a task execution date of June 30, 2023.

Login condition: 1° Having logged into their front-end customer account for the last time beyond the delay you configured in step 2. Example: They last logged into their front-end customer account before December 31, 2022. 2° Or never having logged into the front end after being created in the back office by a user, beyond the delay you configured in step 2. Note: If the customer logged into their front-end account after their back-office creation date, then their last front-end login date takes precedence for calculating the anonymization delay (point 1° above). Example: They were created in the back office before December 31, 2022 and have never logged into their front-end account.

Rental condition: 3° AND having no rentals associated with their customer account Example: a customer is considered inactive on 30/06/2023:

• if they last logged into their front-end customer account before December 31, 2022
• and they have no rentals associated with their customer account as of June 30, 2023.

4° Or only having one or more rentals with a status of completed or cancelled, which ended or were cancelled beyond the delay you configured in step 2. Example: a customer is considered inactive on 30/06/2023:

• if they were created in the back office before December 31, 2022
• never logged into their front-end account
• and they have a rental associated with their customer account with a status of completed or cancelled, which ended or was cancelled before December 31, 2022.

IF ALL THESE CONDITIONS ARE NOT MET, THE CUSTOMER IS NOT CONSIDERED INACTIVE BY THE SYSTEM and will therefore not be anonymized by the scheduled anonymization task, whether launched automatically or manually.

Configure the bulk anonymization delay. Go to the Settings > General configuration menu > GDPR block Here you can configure the delay before anonymization of an inactive customer account. Once this delay has passed, an automatic scheduled task that runs every day will anonymize all inactive customers. If you do not configure any delay in the field, no automatic anonymization will take place.

Don't forget to Save by clicking the button at the bottom of the GDPR block.

Chapter 1 - Automatic bulk anonymization - Remember to activate the associated scheduled task

Go to the Administration > Scheduled tasks menu > search for the task called "Anonymization of all inactive customers or users in the system" > make sure the status is set to "ACTIVE", otherwise click the "INACTIVE" button and confirm the activation. This scheduled task will automatically anonymize inactive customers every morning at 06:00.

Chapter 2: Manual bulk anonymization

If you do not wish to enable automatic anonymization, you can always, at a time of your choosing, go to the scheduled task in the back office and manually launch the anonymization of your inactive customers. To do so, click the purple "Execute the task" button. Note: it is possible that you may have a large number of customers to anonymize at once and that you will need to Execute the task several times in order to process all cases.

You can in any case view the history of the anonymization scheduled task. To do so, click the "view history" button.

History data

The history shows you: 1° The date and time of the last execution of the scheduled task. 2° The number of customers anonymized during the last execution of the task. 3° Whether the task was executed manually or automatically and by which back-office user.

Chapter 3 - Anonymizing a specific customer

If you do not want to anonymize your customers in bulk, or if you wish to anonymize a customer who does not meet the login conditions presented in step 8, you can anonymize them from their customer profile by clicking the "Anonymize" this customer button. Note: in this case the customer must not have any rentals with a status other than completed or cancelled, otherwise the anonymization will be refused. Confirm the anonymization to save.

Effects of anonymization in the back office

Once your customer has been anonymized, their customer account in the back office will no longer contain any personal data, which will be replaced by the term "anonymous" and an encrypted email address.

In the configuration, you can choose to enter an anonymization code. If this field is filled in, all anonymized customer data will carry this code. For example: 8888. Don't forget to save your configuration.

Result of anonymization in the back office with a configured code.

Effects of anonymization in the front office

The customer whose account has been anonymized will no longer be able to access their front-end account and will see this error when attempting to log in.

Chapter 5 - Erasing phone numbers

If you wish to erase only the phone numbers of your inactive customers more regularly, you can also define a delay in the same GDPR block in the delay before phone number erasure field. Note: this delay is in days, not months. Use the scheduled task "Deletion of all phone numbers of inactive customers in the system". You can choose automatic activation or manual use (see steps 4 and 5). You can also view the task execution history. The conditions a customer must meet to be considered inactive are the same as in step 8.