Right to be forgotten: Deleting recipient data

Data security and protecting the privacy of your customers and newsletter recipients is vital important. With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) at the latest, you must provide the possibility of deleting personal data upon request. This is embodied in Article 17 of the GDPR – the so-called "Right to be forgotten".

To irrevocably delete all recipient data from Episerver Campaign (except blocklist entries which is anonymized data), you can use the recipient history in the Episerver Campaign user interface.

A more flexible way is using the Episerver Campaign REST API. This lets you delete recipient data remotely – without logging in to Episerver Campaign. You can, for example, use the Swagger Try it out feature, enter the curl request in the Windows command prompt, or implement a deletion option right into your system, such as a CRM software.

To delete recipient data via REST API, use the DELETE /{clientId}​/recipients operation.

You need the following information:

• Client ID. The ID of the client the REST API is set up for. You can find the client ID in Episerver Campaign under Administration > API Overview > REST API.
• Reason. Reason for data deletion.
• Recipient key. Recipient ID, usually the email address.

The request in curl looks as follows:

curl -X DELETE "https://api.campaign.episerver.net/rest/123456789/recipients?reason=customerrequest&recipientKey=recipient%40example.com" -H "Authorization: BASIC k783r3fjn989dhnfjjdr83dgds1383NDfv="

The following example shows the request as PHP code.

<?php
$user = 'user@example.com'; // API user name, usually your email address 
$password = 'password'; // password of your API user
$clientId = 123456789; // ID of the client the REST API is set up for
$recipientId = 'recipient@example.com'; // ID of the recipient whose data is to be deleted
$reason = 'customerrequest'; // reason for data deletion (without blanks)
$URL = 'https://api.campaign.episerver.net/rest/'.$clientId.'/recipients?recipientKey='.$recipientId.'&reason='.$reason;

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL,$URL);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "DELETE");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30); //timeout after 30 seconds
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$user:$password");

$result = curl_exec ($curl);
$result = json_decode($result, true);
     
echo '<pre>';
var_dump ($result);
echo '</pre><br>';

curl_close ($curl);       

?>​