Pseudonymous Profile data expiration and Experience Event data expiration are complementary features.

Granularity

Pseudonymous Profile data expiration works on a sandbox level. As a result, the data expiration will affect all profiles in the sandbox.

Experience Event data expiration works on a dataset level. As a result, each dataset can have a different data expiration setting.

Identity types

Pseudonymous Profile data expiration only considers profiles that have identity graphs which contain identity namespaces that were selected by the customer, such as ECID, AAID, or other types of cookies. If the profile contains any additional identity namespace that was not in the customer’s selected list, the profile will not be deleted.

Experience Event data expiration removes events only based on the event record’s timestamp. The identity namespaces included are ignored for expiration purposes.

Removed items

Pseudonymous Profile data expiration removes both event and profile records. As a result, the profile class data will also be removed.

Experience Event data expiration only removes events and does not remove profile class data. The profile class data is only removed when all the data is removed across all datasets and there are no profile class records remaining for the profile.

Pseudonymous Profile data expiration and Experience Event data expiration can be used to complement each other.

You should always set up Experience Event data expiration in your datasets, based on your needs of retaining data about your known customers. Once Experience Event data expiration is set up, you can use Pseudonymous Profile data expiration to automatically remove Pseudonymous Profiles. Typically, the data expiration period for Pseudonymous Profiles is less than the data expiration period for Experience Events.

For a typical use case, you can set your Experience Event data expiration based on the values of your known user data and you can set your Pseudonymous Profile data expiration to a much shorter duration to limit the impact of Pseudonymous profiles on your Experience Platform license compliance.

• If you are using Web SDK to directly send data to Experience Platform.
• If you have a website that serves unauthenticated customers en masse.
• If you have excessive profile counts in your datasets and have confirmed that this excessive profile count is because of anonymous cookie-based identity namespace.
  • To determine this, you should use the identity namespace overlap report. More information about this report can be found in the identity overlap report section of the preview sample status API guide.

• Pseudonymous profile data expiration runs at a sandbox level. You can choose to have different configurations for production and development sandboxes.
• Once you have activated this feature, the deletion of profiles is permanent. There is no way to roll back or restore the deleted profiles.
• This is not a one-time cleanup job. Pseudonymous profile data expiration will run once per day and delete profiles that match the customer’s input.
• All profiles that are defined as Pseudonymous profiles will be affected by the Pseudonymous profile data expiration. It does not matter if the profile is Experience Event only or if it only contains profile attributes.
• This cleanup will only occur in Profile. Identity Service may continue to show the deleted identities within the graph after the cleanup in cases where the profile has two or more associated pseudonymous identities (such as AAID and ECID). This discrepancy will be addressed in the near future.
• Pseudonymous profile data expiration does not run immediately, and may take up to three days to process.

• The Identity Service “first-in, first-out” deletion system could delete ECIDs from the identity graph, which are stored in Identity Service.
• If this deletion behavior results in an ECID-only profile being stored in the Real-Time Customer Profile (Profile store), then Pseudonymous profile data expiration will delete this profile from the Profile store.