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Restrict Data Processing for Marketing Cloud Engagement

When situations require you to do so, prevent the processing of your customers’ data. We give guidance to help you restrict forms of data processing. That way, you can work toward complying with the laws that are important to your company.

Various laws and regulations require you and your company to sometimes restrict the processing of your customers’ data. We’ve listed a few of the laws that are important to many companies collecting and processing their customers’ data.

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Union

  • Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, United States


If you encounter situations that require you to restrict data processing for any of your customers, review these common requests and the procedures related to them.

Note
Note Before you restrict contact data from Marketing Cloud Engagement, export the list or data extension containing the restricted contact information for later review and regulatory compliance proof.
Common Customer Request Actions to Consider Things to Consider
How do I prevent Marketing Cloud Engagement activities from processing the information for a specific contact?
  • If you manage contact information via our REST API, use the contact restriction routes to prevent processing of a specified contact.
  • Contact your account executive to restrict processing or remove restrictions for a contact. To delete a restricted contact, request the removal of a restriction first.
  • Export information before you restrict processing to ensure you can prove regulatory compliance.
  • Review any ENS subscriptions that contain engagement events.
  • Stop processing to verify data accuracy for a contact during a specific time period.
  • Stop processing data because said processing is unlawful, but the contact wants to retain data anyway.
  • The data is no longer required for activities, but you must hold the data for legal claims or hold.
  • Contact objected to processing under their right to object.
  • Marketing Cloud Engagement does not send or process triggered sends to restricted contacts.
  • Einstein Web Recommendations, Einstein Email Recommendations, and Web & Mobile Analytics use separate app and API interfaces to delete contact information. One request to any product in this group affects all products.
  • Refrain from using restricted contacts as the subject of a test send to avoid accidental sends.
  • This restriction removes information from sendable data extensions.
  • The Do Not Track process doesn’t stop subscriber data events from emitting to your Event Notification Service Callback if you’re subscribed to events that contain subscriber data. Events can be emitted from before and after the Do Not Track request if the subscriber continues to engage with Marketing Cloud Engagement content with tracking. Users should carefully opt-in and understand the implications to using the ENS engagement events.
How do I remove restrictions for a previously restricted contact? Contact your account executive to remove restriction for a previously restricted contact. Remove processing restrictions only when legally permissible.

If a data subject makes a data compliance request via Marketing Cloud Engagement for MobilePush, we send a silent push to the customer app to indicate the applicable change. The SDK also makes the customer app check in daily for data compliance changes. If Engagement sends the silent push and the device does not process it before the next check-in, the device may not comply with regulations until then. After a Restriction of Processing request takes place, the data subject can opt-in to further processing by deleting and reinstalling the customer app.

MobileConnect continues to process and honor opt-out requests even when a contact is in a Restriction of Processing state. The contact does not receive a message confirming the opt-out. This opt-out persists even after a contact leaves the Restriction of Processing state.

Data protection and privacy compliance can require you to encrypt all data during transit. We recommend taking these steps to ensure compliance.

  • To help ensure TLS compliance, use the latest version of your browser and HTTPS addresses to connect to Marketing Cloud Engagement.
  • Use OAuth access token authentication for REST and SOAP API calls.
  • Follow our API security best practices.
  • Use SSL certificates for all landing pages.

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See Also

1 Rights of ALBERT EINSTEIN are used with permission of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Represented exclusively by Greenlight.