Pseudonymous profiles data expiration

Last update: February 4, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • User

In Adobe Experience Platform, you can configure data expiration times for Pseudonymous profiles, allowing you to automatically remove data from the Profile store that is no longer valid or useful for your use cases.

Pseudonymous profile

A profile is considered for Pseudonymous data expiration if it meets the following conditions:

  • The stitched profile’s identity namespaces match what the customer has specified as a pseudonymous or unknown identity namespace.
    • For example, if the profile’s identity namespace is ECID, GAID, or AAID. The stitched profile has no IDs from any other identity namespace. In this example, a stitched profile does not have either an email or CRM identity.
  • No activity has taken place in a user-defined amount of time. Activity is defined either by any Experience Events being ingested or customer-initiated updates to the profile attributes.
    • For example, a new page view event or age attribute update is considered as an activity. However, a non-user-initiated audience membership update is not considered as an activity. Currently, to compute data expiration, the tracking at a profile level is based on the time of event for Experience Events and time of ingestion for profile attributes.

Access

Pseudonymous Profile data expiration cannot be configured through the Platform UI or APIs. Instead, you must contact support in order to enable this feature. When contacting support, please include the following information:

  • The identity namespaces to be considered for Pseudonymous profile deletes.
    • For example: ECID only, AAID only, or a combination of ECID and AAID.
  • The amount of time to wait before deleting a pseudonymous profile. The default recommendation for customers is 14 days. However, this value may differ based on your use case.

Frequently asked questions

The following section lists frequently asked questions regarding Pseudonymous profiles data expiration:

How does Pseudonymous Profile data expiration differ from Experience Event data expiration?

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.

How can Pseudonymous Profile data expiration be used in conjunction with Experience Event data expiration?

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 Platform license compliance.

What users should be using Pseudonymous profiles data expiration?

  • If you are using Web SDK to directly send data to 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.