Step 5: De-identification Support for Special Objects like Tasks, Events & Notes

Updated on February 27, 2023

Salesforce activities include tasks, events, and calendars. With Salesforce, track tasks and meetings together in lists and reports to easily prioritize time and keep up with user accounts, campaigns, contacts, leads, and opportunities.

Tasks allow users to Keep a to-do list in Salesforce and stay right on top of the deals and accounts. Also, it helps easily relate every task to records for leads, contacts, campaigns, contracts, and other information that you need. Using Events users can use Events to track meetings with customers, prospects, and colleagues. Drill down from events to related records, feeds, files, contracts, and more.

With Notes, users can use rich text, lists, and images inside notes and also relate notes to multiple records. All these special objects can contain PII data that needs to be deleted or anonymized. Cloud Compliance supports deletion as well as de-identification of such data. 

1. Deletion of data from Tasks, Events, and Notes – 

For completely deleting PII data associated with these objects, users need to configure ‘Settings’ under de-identification mappings of the respective object.

Let us assume that, one needs to delete notes, tasks, and events associated with the contact record. To achieve this, go to Implement Tab -> RTBF/De-identification -> Open Contact De-identification mapping. Under the ‘Settings’ section, enable switchers for Delete Events, Delete Notes and Delete Tasks. When the user performs contacts de-identification, then along with the corresponding contact record, notes, events, and tasks also get deleted completely.

If the use case is to delete all notes, events, and tasks related to Parent, Child, and Grandchild object, then all these switchers need to be enabled under these three levels of mappings.

Note – If Delete Tasks is enabled then it will delete all the tasks associated with the record as well as the Emails also. Delete Email switcher is specifically used in a case where the user wants to delete Emails but needs to de-identify tasks.

2. De-identification of  Notes, Events ad Tasks.

Cloud Compliance supports the de-identification of notes, events, and tasks associated with contact/lead/ account or any other object. By default, these objects won’t be available under de-identification mapping. Users need to enable these objects from the custom metadata setting packaged under the Cloud Compliance application.

Follow the steps given below for creating de-identification mappings for Notes, events, and tasks.

  • The user needs to go to setup, in quick find type for Custom Metadata Type.
  • Click on the ‘Manage Records’ action of ’PII data’ in custom metadata types. This will be coming from Cloud Compliance’s package.
  • Click on the ‘ Whitelisted Object Config’  label from the list.
  • The Value field will be having the value ‘Task, Event, Note, Attachment’.

That means all these objects are prohibited to be added as a child object under contact/account/lead or any other object.

  • The user needs to remove these objects from the Whitelisted Object configuration so that it can be available as a child object under de-identification mapping. Click on the Edit button and remove these objects except attachments.

Note – Attachments Body is of the type Blob (Binary Large Object)  which is basically a binary representation of data. Hence it can not be de-identified.

  • Go to the Implement tab, and Create a New de-identification mapping. Let us assume the Contact object is a parent in this case.
  • Click on the Reconfigure button in the dropdown for Contact Object Make sure that Delete Events, Delete Notes, and Delete Tasks are disabled.

Note – If this delete setting is not disabled, then events, notes, and tasks will be deleted instead of de-identification.

  • Click on the Dropdown and navigate to Add ‘Related Object’.Select ‘Task’ as a Child object
  • Click on the ‘Field Mappings’from the dropdown of the Task object to add fields for de-identification.
  • Make sure that Delete Events, Delete Notes, and Delete Tasks are disabled for this Task De-identification mapping. Add the fields in this de-identification mapping that may contain PII data.
  • Similarly, add Notes and Events in the child object under Contact. Make sure that Delete Events, Delete Notes, and Delete Tasks are disabled.
  • Take a Sample contact record that contains Notes, events, and tasks.
  • De-identify this contact using cascade de-identification.