Introducing DELETE, A Privacy Feature for Deleting Call and Message Activity

Introducing DELETE, A Privacy Feature for Deleting Call and Message Activity

Today, we’re happy to announce a new feature,  DELETE, that lets you easily manage data privacy in your applications. You can now programmatically delete call records, SMS message bodies, and much more using the API interface. After deletion, these records will no longer be exposed in the API logs or the Account Portal. This gives you the ability to make sure only authorized users have access to sensitive customer data.

Data privacy isn’t just a way to protect your company and stay out of the news, it’s also good business. 89% of consumers say that they avoid doing business with companies they think don’t protect their privacy (TRUSTe 2014 survey).

DELETE is free to all Twilio users.  This new features gives you more control of privacy and data security in Voice and Messaging communications than ever before. You can delete anything from Notifications, Calls, Recordings, Transcriptions, Messages, Message Bodies and Message Media.

To delete a recording, for example, simply send the DELETE HTTP method to the recording you would like to delete.  Here is an example using cURL:

For Twilio Messages, you can even delete discrete data like message bodies.  This is accomplished by using the POST HTTP method and passing an empty value for the Body parameter.

This feature is also available in your helper library of choice – just follow the upgrade instructions for your language here.

Your data privacy is important to us. Data protection laws prohibit businesses from misusing or disclosing users’ private information in over 80 countries. We strongly believe that your information is yours to control, and we’re providing you the tools, like  DELETE API, that help you protect that information.

We are excited to introduce this new feature to our customers and have also published two FAQs on How to delete message media or message bodies and How to delete call recordings and transcriptions to help you get started.

Don’t have an account yet? You can sign-up for free here. Also, reach out to us at help@twilio.com if you have any questions.