Privacy Service troubleshooting guide

Adobe Experience Platform Privacy Service provides a RESTful API and user interface to help companies manage customer data privacy requests. With Privacy Service, you can submit requests to access and delete private or personal customer data, facilitating automated compliance with organizational and legal privacy regulations.

This document provides answers to frequently asked questions about Privacy Service, as well as information on commonly encountered errors in the API.

When making privacy requests in the API, what is the difference between a user and a user ID? user-ids

In order to make a new privacy job in the API, the JSON payload of the request must contain a users array that lists specific information for each user to which the privacy request applies. Each item in the users array is an object which represents a particular user, identified by its key value.

In turn, each user object (or key) contains its own userIDs array. This array lists specific ID values for that one particular user.

Consider the following example users array:

"users": [
  {
    "key": "DavidSmith",
    "action": ["access"],
    "userIDs": [
      {
        "namespace": "email",
        "value": "dsmith@acme.com",
        "type": "standard"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "key": "user12345",
    "action": ["access", "delete"],
    "userIDs": [
      {
        "namespace": "email",
        "value": "ajones@acme.com",
        "type": "standard"
      },
      {
        "namespace": "ECID",
        "type": "standard",
        "value":  "443636576799758681021090721276",
        "isDeletedClientSide": false
      }
    ]
  }
]

The array contains two objects, representing individual users identified by their key values (“DavidSmith” and “user12345”). “DavidSmith” only has one listed ID (their email address), whereas “user12345” has two (their email address and ECID).

For more information on providing user identity information, see the guide on identity data for privacy requests.

Can I use Privacy Service to clean up data that was accidentally sent to Platform?

Adobe does not support using Privacy Service for clearing out data that was accidentally submitted to a product. Privacy Service is designed to assist you in meeting your obligations for data subject (or consumer) access or delete requests. Any other usage of Privacy Service for data cleanup or maintenance is not supported or allowed.

Privacy requests are time-sensitive and are completed related to applicable privacy law. the submission of requests which are not data-subject/consumer access or delete requests impacts all Privacy Service customers and the ability for Privacy Service to support the appropriate legal timelines. A hard daily upload limit is now in place to help prevent abuse of the service.

Please contact your Adobe account team to coordinate and provide a level of effort to remove any PII or data issues.

How do I get information about the status of my privacy request or job?

You can retrieve details about a particular job by using the Privacy Service API or user interface.

Using the API

To retrieve the status of a particular job using the Privacy Service API, make a request to the root (GET /) endpoint, using the job’s ID in the request path. For more details, see the section on checking the status of a job in the Privacy Service API guide.

Using the UI

All active job requests are listed in the Job Requests widget on the Privacy Service UI dashboard. The status for each job request is displayed under the Status column. For more information on viewing job requests in the UI, please see the Privacy Service user guide.

How do I download the results of my completed privacy jobs?

The Privacy Service API and user interface both provide methods for downloading the results of completed jobs in ZIP format.

Using the API

Make a request to the root (GET /) endpoint in the Privacy Service API, using the ID of the job whose results you want to download in the request path. If the job’s status is complete, the API will include a downloadURL attribute in the response body. This attribute contains a URL that you can paste into the address bar of your browser to download the ZIP file.

For more details, see the section on looking up a job by its ID in the Privacy Service API guide.

Using the UI

On the Privacy Service UI dashboard, find the job you want to download from the Job Requests widget. Select the ID of the job to open the Job Details page. From here, select Download in the top-right corner to download the ZIP file. See the Privacy Service user guide for more detailed steps.

Common error messages common-error-messages

The following table outlines some common errors in Privacy Service, with descriptions to help resolve their respective issues.