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Ability to remove historically collected events?

  • 10 August 2021
  • 4 replies
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Hi there, 

New to this space so hello to everyone here! Wanted to check whether it’s possible to remove historically collected data, specifically a set of direct PHI identifiers that were saved as user properties (IP/Lat/Long) in Amplitude.

 

ideally, would not want to delete all previously registered events from Amplitude but more so just the underlying properties that make it non-compliant at the moment. 

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Best answer by Saish Redkar 10 August 2021, 01:30

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Userlevel 7
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Hey @pSingh ,

Welcome to the Amplitude Community!

Currently, it is not possible to modify the raw event data that have already been ingested in Amplitude in a given project. Here is an article which explains a couple of alternative approaches to handle this problem.  Amplitude also gives you the option to prevent it from collecting data on a specific user property by blocking it.

If you are using the JS SDK implementation to send data, you can disable tracking of the PII properties you have mentioned above.  Also as per this doc, “the trackingOptions configurations will only prevent default properties from being tracked on newly created projects, where data has not yet been sent. If you have a project with existing data that you would like to stop collecting the default properties for, please contact our Support team at support.amplitude.com. Note that the existing data will not be deleted.”

Also, I don’t think it’s possible to delete the user properties from historical events and just keep the event data since both those go hand in hand in the way Amplitude operates.

If this is useful, Amplitude has a User Privacy API to ensure GDPR compliance and you can leverage it to delete historical data collected on a user. This would wipe out both the user properties and events recorded against that user from Amplitude.

 

Hope this helps!

Userlevel 6
Badge +8

Hi @pSingh ! 

Welcome!! We are so excited to have you here :) 

Saish pretty much covered it and my colleague mentioned you have reached out directly as well. 

One last thing I wanted to share with the group is that if you really need to disable tracking for all users in an already created project, the Support team does have a backend tool to help disable Lat/Long/IP address etc for your users moving forward! Please reach out separately if you need this. 

 

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@belinda.chiu  how do we connect with Support . 

Userlevel 6
Badge +8

Hi @Cuepra_APP ! Welcome to Amplitude Community and I’m happy to help! 👋 Please DM me your project ID and which values in this list https://developers.amplitude.com/docs/javascript#disable-tracking that you want to scrub off of any incoming events. I will apply the backend functionality for you. 

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