---
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id: a26c1efed1ee26ea67a1066844287eadcb9eedbe2d565fe25956a7d06551e972
title: Mask, Delete, or Retain Data with Data Management Policies
collection: admin
version: current
locale: en-us
portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/xcloud/264-0-0/data_management_policies.md
canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.data_management_policies.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5
source_site: help.salesforce.com
content_type: documentation
content_hash: a1dc634e884b96e00876c9ac800e6ffd821fc5ed7e95588b16f6df00f313e4de
description: Data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires businesses to minimize the amount of personal data stored. For the data that businesses choose to store, they can be required to pseudo-anonymize or anonymize that data as much as possible. To stay compliant with privacy law, businesses can use the Data Management Policies feature in Privacy Center to automate how data is deleted, masked, or retained.
products:
  - Security
  - Cross Cloud
release: "264"
---
# Mask, Delete, or Retain Data with Data Management Policies

Data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires businesses to minimize the amount of personal data stored. For the data that businesses choose to store, they can be required to pseudo-anonymize or anonymize that data as much as possible. To stay compliant with privacy law, businesses can use the Data Management Policies feature in Privacy Center to automate how data is deleted, masked, or retained.

### Required Editions

<table class="slds-table slds-table_bordered slds-max-medium-table_stacked slds-m-bottom_small edition"><colgroup><col></colgroup><tbody><tr class=""><td class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;">Available in: <strong>Developer</strong>, <strong>Enterprise</strong>, <strong>Performance</strong>, and <strong>Unlimited</strong> Editions. Requires the Privacy Center license.</td></tr></tbody></table>

Data management policies use the Privacy Policy object to execute masking and deletion transformation actions that you set for targeted data. You can also retain the processed records by copying them to an external data store. For each top-level object in your Data Management policy, you create one or more actions. Each object action includes:

- Criteria to filter and identify the records to be processed
- An object transformation action to mask or delete
- Field and file-level actions to mask or delete
- Optional retention actions for the processed records

The filter criteria are based on the fields on the object. The criteria also support the ability to define parent conditions, where the filter checks the value of a related record up to 5 levels higher in the hierarchy. You can also define criteria on child records, which have a lookup or master-detail relationship to the current record by using cross-object queries.

- **[How to Use Data Management Policies](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.data_management_uses.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5)**  
    Use Data Management policies to remove or mask data that you no longer want to store. Common reasons to transform data include when a data subject is no longer a customer or when data has aged out of use in your system. Included are examples of how to use Data Management policies for these use cases.
- **[How to Configure Data Management Policies](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.configure_data_management_policies.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5)**  
    Learn how to configure a Data Management Policy with our step-by-step guide.