Removing Deactivated User PII

Overview

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adherence raises the possibility that Verify Privilege Vault users may make a data removal claim against a Verify Privilege Vault administrator. This requires removing any personally identifiable information (PII) in Verify Privilege Vault for that individual.

To address this, Verify Privilege Vault has a button that automatically removes most PII for any deactivated user.

Permissions

To remove a user's PII, you need edit rights on that user, which means one of the following:

  • The Administer Users role permission.
  • The Own User role permission, if you belong to a group that owns the user. See User Owners.

The user must also be disabled. The Remove Personally Identifiable Information button appears only for a disabled user whose PII has not already been removed.

The REST API endpoint POST /api/v1/users/delete-pii/{id} performs the same removal. Starting in Verify Privilege Vault 12.0 (Cloud, January 2026; on-premises 12.0.000022), the endpoint enforces the same edit-rights check as the button and returns an access denied error otherwise. Scripts that call this endpoint with an account that lacks these permissions stop working after the upgrade.

For details on each permission, see Verify Privilege Vault Role Permissions List.

Removing the PII

  1. Remove the user from Active Directory (AD). See Active Directory Considerations below.

  2. In Verify Privilege Vault, Search for User Management and select the Users tab.

  3. Click the user name link for the desired user. The View User Page appears.

  4. Click the Remove Personally Identifiable Information button. A confirmation dialog box appears.

    Once you confirm, the user cannot log on to Verify Privilege Vault. Click the Cancel button if you are not positive this is what you want to do.

    Clicking the OK button will change these to random values or set them to null:

    • Username
    • Display name
    • Password
    • Personal folder name
    • Personal group name
    • RADIUS username

    In addition:

    • The user's AD GUID is cleared
    • The user's email address is removed from their record
    • The user's name is replaced with "<redacted>" in event audits where it can be clearly identified.
    • The PII removal is recorded in the user's audit

  5. Click the OK button. The removal begins. Once complete, the Remove PII button disappears for that user.

  6. (Optional) Run a query that scans the entire Verify Privilege Vault database for the removed strings. You may want to do this because the process cannot find all potential instances of USER PII throughout Verify Privilege Vault, such as that in secret names or notes.

You can create an Event Subscription to "remove user PII" events.

Active Directory Considerations

We recommend removing the user from AD before removing the PII. If you remove the PII without first removing the user from AD, the user is reintroduced into Verify Privilege Vault on subsequent AD synchs. This creates a new user account in Verify Privilege Vault, which might require you to disable this new user account and remove its PII too (after removing the AD user).