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Erase people after inactivity

Turn on erasure of a person's identifiers after a set time without activity, and make sure the person is told first.

How-to2 min readFor project administrators and deployment operators

Turn this on to erase a person's identifiers after a set time without activity. It follows Rule 8 of India's DPDP Rules. It is off by default.

Who must turn it on#

From 13 May 2027, the Rules require erasure after 3 years of inactivity for some large platforms. These are e-commerce and social media platforms with at least 2 crore registered users in India. Online gaming platforms with at least 50 lakh are covered too.

Before you start#

  • Add a webhook endpoint that receives subject.erasure_notice and subject.erased_inactive. See Manage webhook endpoints.
  • Ask your developers to tell the person when the notice arrives.
  • Ask your developers to report activity from your server. See Activity.

No endpoint, no erasure

If no active endpoint receives subject.erasure_notice, nobody can be told. So nothing is erased.

Turn it on#

  1. Open Settings.
  2. In the Consent lifetime panel, find Erase after inactivity.
  3. Choose 1 year, 3 years or 5 years.
  4. Choose Save settings.

The console shows Settings saved. A job then checks every hour for people who are due.

What happens to an inactive person#

Activity is one of three things. The person gives or changes consent. The person makes a rights request. Your server reports activity.

  1. 72 hours before the period ends, subject.erasure_notice is sent, once for the person.
  2. Your systems tell the person, so that they have at least 48 hours' notice.
  3. If the person becomes active again, the notice is cancelled.
  4. When the period ends, the person's identifiers are erased and subject.erased_inactive is sent.
  5. Your systems erase their own copy of the person's data.

The erasure works like Erase identifiers on the Records page, with two differences:

  • subject.erased_inactive stands for both consent.withdrawn and subject.erased. Those two are not sent.
  • A record that is only linked to the person's identifier, not kept under it, is left as it is.
Details of the clock
  • Inactivity is judged on live records. Test records do not keep a person active.
  • For records under the DPDP Act, the clock starts no earlier than 13 November 2025.
  • The erasure never happens less than 48 hours after the notice.
  • The job handles up to 500 people for each project in a run.

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