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Automatic deletion of older responses?

  • 15 January 2024
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J
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Hi All, is it possible in Typeform to automatically delete responses that are older than X days ? - We have a survey running through typeform that does collect some personal information. We transfer some of the key results to our Marketing system using Zapier so I don’t need to keep the results in Typeform longer term and would like to avoid storing the personal data there. Ideally I would like to delete responses from typeform automatically after X days.
 

We currently have 2700 responses over past 6 weeks so doing this manually is going to be a real pain. I can only select/delete 100 responses at the time. I just realised I can’t use the filters either because we have more than 2000 responses so that means I have to individually select 7 x 100 responses and then I can use the filter to select 100 at the time to get rid of the other 2000 -- not really a workable ongoing process.

Any ideas ?  @Liz , any chance there are some features in the pipeline for this?

 

 

 

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Best answer by victorwu 15 January 2024, 22:01

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victorwu
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Hi @JohanMM : Sounds like you said you have already used the date filter. And that’s not good enough for you right? Is that the idea?

 

 

Another option is using the Typeform API to delete responses, but that would require a bit more technical work. An implementation would be to have a daily job to hit the API of your form and delete old responses. You mention Zapier. I see that Zapier has the ability to make API calls in https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/12899607716493-Set-up-an-API-Request-action. GitHub Actions would also be another lightweight solution that your org probably is already using to schedule a daily job to delete responses via the API. But that also requires some technical work too. 

If you or someone on your team are able to use these tools, they could be good solutions. Unfortunately, I’m not able to offer more support beyond that. Hope this helps! 

Liz
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Thank you, @victorwu ! Let us know how this goes for you, @JohanMM !

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
J
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Thank you @victorwu and @Liz  -  API approach is just a bit too technical for me as it doesn’t allow a relatively simple “delete all responses older than 30 days” or something to that effect - based on a quick review I would have to do a retrieve call to find all the item ids for the older forms (max 1000) and then I would have to store those results and then make a second API call to delete those forms - due to the limit of 1000 this would need more logic to deal with the instance where there is more than 1000.

Does Typeform have any plans to provide some better data management tools in the solution itself - The current limit of deletion requests is 100 max which is my main problem.  I can use the date selection tool in Typeform to quickly get results that are older than 30 days, but because we have approximately 100 entries each day, I have to select and delete each day 1 by 1, which takes about 1 minute per day - so to delete 2 months of data I need at least an hour of tedious deletion work. If the 100 limit didn’t exist I could put in the request in 1 minute total - It would also mean your database only has to deal with one query and one deletion request, rather than me pushing 60 individual search requests and 60 individual deletion requests to your service.

Ideally you would provide an automated configuration option on the form to automatically delete results after x days - I would use that on most of our forms since for most of our forms the data is only relevant for one or two months - If we need data longer, I will generally push it to an external data store like Excel or Keap anyway. 

victorwu
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Hi @JohanMM : 

We don’t have anything planned for auto-deleting at the moment. Thanks for the feedback! We will consider it.

(1) One workaround is duplicating your form. https://www.typeform.com/help/a/how-to-duplicate-a-typeform-360029295012/ You can then delete your old form (removing it’s data) and use the new form going forward to collect new data. The new form doesn’t have the old form’s responses. A few caveats though:
- You would need to use customized urls, ensuring that the new form uses the old form’s url. This would ensure that your respondents still can access your form: https://www.typeform.com/help/a/how-to-customize-your-typeform-url-360029251372/
- Duplicating a form duplicates questions, but not much more. You would have to re-set up integrations, follow-ups, and other configs. So if your form is using many features, this might not be workable.

 

(2) Another workaround is send data to Google Sheets integration. https://www.typeform.com/help/a/google-sheets-for-typeform-360029256192/. You can set this up once to send all existing responses to a google sheet and have new responses stream to the sheet. So this would indeed be a one-time set up.

With all your data in replicated in Google Sheets, you may feel more comfortable deleting all/most of the responses in Typeform since you said you’d want to avoid storing data in Typeform, especially personal data. In Google sheets, you’d have a lot more functionality to filter rows based on date to quickly do your operations, such as deleting old data, maintaining fresh data, etc. And with Google sheets, you’d be able to create automations to do this so that you should be able to do this hopefully with little manual work, and perhaps even on a scheduled basis.


(3) Another workaround is playing around with the date picker so that you can capture up to 100 responses, allowing you to bulk delete them easily. In the screenshot below, I was able to pick a date range so that only 99 responses appear and then I can delete them all at once using the bulk checkbox.

Hope that helps.

 



 

Liz
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Oh wow, thanks so much, @victorwu ! Let us know if you give any of these a try, @JohanMM . 😁

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
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@Liz and @victorwu - thank you for your efforts here but the workarounds really don’t work for me. We run this quiz as an integral part of our website. Many days I get more than 100 responses a day so deleting these manually remains really inefficient (today I have to delete 4000 of them) :( 

Duplicated the form regularly is also not practical because as I said this is a permanent part of our website and I would have check and update the links and integrations each time with the risk of errors.

 We are already sending the core information we want to keep from the response through to our Marketing system so I don’t really need the information in Type form at all, however since I can’t auto delete the responses, the only way I can prevent from having personal information stored unnecessary in Typeform is to manually delete these forms.

I really do think the auto deletion / archiving option (delete after x days) should be a basic feature and relatively easy to implement.

Since your forms do support the collection of personal identifiable information it would seem a basic requirement to allow users to manage this PII data in line with mainstream privacy legislation which suggests information should be deleted if it is no longer of use to the person who collected it.

Is there a way you could keep me informed whether this feature is something that is in pipeline for the near future?

J
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@victorwu - maybe a good piece of information to share with your development team is that to delete the February data I just had to issue 29 searches (one for each day) and approximately 35 deletion requests.  If the team allowed me to delete more than 100 records at the time, I could have done this through one search (1 to 29 Feb) and one deletion request - that would be a much more efficient approach for your underlying database.

john.desborough
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@JohanMM - one thing to note, it is not Typeform’s responsibility to manage the PII that YOUR forms collect - that is a responsibility on you and I as owners of the form to manage that. I always counsel my clients that they need to set up a business process task to review and delete the data on a regular basis.

I agree that a more efficient way to delete records would be beneficial to those of us who need to remove data and hope that there will be something coming in the future from Typeform. 

 

des

If your third coffee of the day is not helping you with your Typeform, maybe we can help you find your answers...

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