Use Privacy Center to anonymize or delete every personal data point Salesforce holds about a single subject, then produce a closure report for the privacy officer.
- Open Privacy Center
Setup, Privacy Center. The home tab shows open subject requests, recent runs, and policy health.
- Look up the subject
Search by email, full name, or Salesforce ID. The result shows every matching record across Lead, Contact, Person Account, User, and the Individual object.
- Select the erase policy
Pick the policy that matches the subject type (for example, Contact-FullErase). Review the field list and related objects the policy will touch. Adjust if this request needs an exception.
- Run the policy
Click Run. Privacy Center queues a background job. For most subjects the job completes in seconds; large subjects with many cases, opportunities, and emails take a few minutes.
- Review the closure report
The report lists every record acted on, the action taken (anonymize or delete), and any record that was skipped (held under retention, locked by litigation hold). Save the report PDF for your privacy file.
- Confirm to the subject
Send the subject the standard confirmation email referencing the request ID. The audit trail entry preserves the evidence the team acted within the regulatory deadline.
Reusable template that defines which fields to anonymize, which objects to follow, and what closure report to produce.
Scheduled job that ages out records on a per-object basis. Supports archive, delete, and hold flags.
Packaged data download with all personal data on a subject. Configurable to include or exclude attachments.
Per-record marker that exempts a record from automated retention and erasure runs. Used for litigation or active investigations.
- Privacy Center only acts on data in the Salesforce org. Marketing Cloud send logs, archived Big Object data, and third-party systems need their own privacy workflow.
- Anonymization rewrites records in place. Reports and dashboards that filtered on the original email or name silently change after the run; refresh them and re-test.
- The audit trail captures who ran each action. Privacy admins should use named user accounts (not a shared service user) so the trail attributes the action to a real person.
- Erase policies that follow related objects can fan out across the data model unexpectedly. Test new policies in a sandbox first, with a representative subject, to confirm the scope is what you intended.