As Act! LLC is now a distributor of Linktivity products, we have expanded our geographic coverage significantly. This means we must comply with different regions' regulations, such as the GDPR in the European Union and PIPEDA in Canada. In both these examples, the regulations are about protecting people's privacy, and us providing our subscribers the ability to easily respect those privacy rights. 

We understand that our subscribers will collect personal information from consumers, such as their names, addresses, IP addresses, and email addresses, when they're quoted, when they fill out a web form or survey, or when they sign up for an event. Even though this information is given voluntarily, the GDPR & Canadian PIPEDA legislation gives customers the right to request that this information be deleted or redacted from our servers.

Protecting People's Privacy
To that end, we are making the following changes to our Linktivity Workspace settings this week to enable our subscribers to erase this consumer data from their Linktivity records easily.

• In the Workspace Settings (under General Settings), users will be able to scroll down and click on the “Purge Personal Information” button (only accessible by an Admin), and select which Linktivity program data they want to erase. They can choose all or specific programs.
• Similarly, in the same Workspace Settings, we are also adding an option to schedule the deletion of all customer data after a certain number of days. Like the manual purge, subscribers can choose the data from all or some programs to delete, and it will be done automatically at the frequency they set. Manual purging will still be available even with a schedule in place, so the subscriber is always in charge.

To be clear, statistical data such as the responses people give in surveys or web forms will remain untouched, as well as the sales data from Link2quotes. Only the consumer details related to the GDPR will be removed. 

The data that will be removed or redacted:

• Contact details submitted by visitors including name, email, phone number, IP address, etc are redacted (Link2quotes, Link2calendar, Link2forms, Link2events, and Link2surveys).
• Participant and representative names in appointment bookings (Link2calendar).
• Aggregate data and non-personally identifiable data will not be deleted from submissions (Link2quotes, Link2forms, Link2events, and Link2surveys)
• Contacts whose submissions are being purged will be opted out of subsequent drip campaigns (Link2forms, Link2events, and Link2surveys).
• Names and emails in activity log (Link2quotes)
• Purged personal information in quote data may be restored when quotes are synchronized from Act! (Link2quotes).

All these actions are permanent and irreversible once performed.

Please note that Linktivity does not purport to offer legal services, and subscribers are encouraged to independently verify their GDPR or related compliance obligations.

Server Security
As for our servers, subscribers can also rest assured that all Linktivity data is stored on secure Microsoft Azure servers in Canada, which use server-side encryption (SSE) to safeguard your data and help you fulfill your organizational security and compliance requirements. Data in Azure-managed disks is encrypted transparently using 256-bit AES encryption, one of the most powerful block ciphers available, and is FIPS 140-2 compliant. The best part is Azure Storage encryption doesn't impact the performance of the Linktivity services. 

These changes will be pushed into production by Friday, February 16th.