You ran a data-retention action and nothing seemed to happen, or you want to know exactly what it will delete before you press the button. Here's what the controls on the privacy settings page actually do.
What's happening
Retention lives under Settings → Privacy & Compliance, in the Data Retention Policy card. There are three distinct controls and they do different things:
- Inactive Member Retention (a dropdown plus Save) — sets how many months after a member's last activity their data is flagged for de-identification. Changing it only changes the policy; it does not delete anything on its own.
- Run scan — a preview. It reports how many records are currently past the retention period without changing any data.
- Apply retention — the action that actually runs the cleanup. It deletes eligible documents and anonymises eligible inactive members, then reports the resulting counts in the confirmation message.
The fixed periods shown next to these (Financial Records, Audit Logs, Health screening data, Consent Records) are display-only. They are legally mandated retention windows and cannot be changed from this screen.
How to fix it
- Check you used the right button. Save only stores the policy. To delete or anonymise data you must use Apply retention.
- Run Run scan first. If it reports "No records are currently past the retention period," then there is genuinely nothing to apply yet — that is why Apply retention reported zero changes. Records only become eligible once they are past the configured Inactive Member Retention window with no recent activity.
- Read the confirmation toast after Apply retention. It tells you how many documents were deleted and how many members were anonymised. Zero on both is a valid result, not an error.
- Remember that financial, audit, health, and consent records are retained for their fixed legal periods regardless of your inactive-member setting, so applying retention will not remove those.
- If a member you expected to be cleaned up is still present, confirm they have actually been inactive longer than the retention window — any recent activity resets the clock.
If the Apply retention action returns an error toast, note the time and contact support; this is a processing failure, not a configuration issue you can fix from this screen.