Purge Versus Obfuscate

Purging involves physical deletion of a record. On the other hand, obfuscation involves updating certain fields in the table that are considered personally identifiable information (PII) – e.g. name, address, etc. The values of these fields are updated to blank or some value that is no longer identifiable to a person – e.g. the random-generated primary key of the Person record.

Base-supplied Person, Account and SA erasure logic performs obfuscation on the root tables of these maintenance objects (MOs). The reasons are:

  • Purging could have impacts to external systems

  • Purging might cause orphan data or invalid foreign key references within the system

However, base logic does purge most of the data in these MOs’ child tables. The exceptions are characteristic tables and some SA child tables that do not contain PII.

Refer to the next sections for details on each object’s obfuscation processing.