Personal data not being erased.

[amooreto]

I am testing out the "Erase Personal Data" tool. I went through the flow of sending the request and approving it via email.

When I click on the "Erase Personal Data" button I get the message saying "No personal data was found for this user.".

This seems odd as I have things like Name and Email added to my user account. This information can be seen when I run the Personal Data Export.

What information are we considering to be "personal data" that can be erased?

[amooreto]

"No personal data was found for this user." message

[amooreto]

Personal data export

[amooreto]

From what I can see, comments are being anonymized, but the personal user data is not.

[iandunn]

@allendav or @desrosj can confirm this, but IIRC it only anonymizes data that you can't already edit yourself, via wp-admin/profile.php. For example, data collected by plugins.

There's also the issue that deleting the user is a separate step from erasing their data (see #43923).

If that's correct, maybe it needs to be stated explicitly to avoid confusion. That may be taken care of by #43923.

[allendav]

@iandunn is correct - we didn't take the extra step of building an anonymizer/eraser for user meta because we presume that the next step for registered users is to delete the user (which cleans up the core user meta).

And @iandunn is right - easy access to the Delete User flow is added in #43923

[iandunn]

It sounds like this can be closed, then, since #43923 will add a message that fixes the confusion.

[desrosj]

Moving to the new Privacy component.

[ebai4]

I was expecting the "Erase Personal Data" tool to delete all content created by the user along with the user itself and the usermeta. All it does is anonymizing the comments? Am I right?