Answer access and erasure requests across all your forms

Chapter III of the GDPR gives the people who fill in your forms a set of rights. The two you will see most often:

• Access (Article 15). Confirmation of whether you hold their data, a copy of it, and information such as the purposes, the recipients and how long you keep it.
• Erasure (Article 17). Deletion when, among other grounds, the data is no longer needed, consent is withdrawn, or they object and there is no overriding reason to keep it. Article 17(3) lists exceptions, such as data you must keep to comply with a legal obligation.

People can also ask for correction (Article 16), restriction (Article 18) or a portable copy (Article 20), and object to processing based on legitimate interests (Article 21).

Article 12(3) sets the clock: respond without undue delay and within one month of receipt, extendable by two further months for complex or numerous requests if you tell the person within the first month. The answer is normally free (Article 12(5)).

If you have reasonable doubts about who is asking, you may ask for information to confirm their identity (Article 12(6)). For form data a proportionate check is often a reply from the email address that appears in the submissions. Avoid asking for more data, such as an ID scan, than the request justifies. The European Data Protection Board's Guidelines 01/2022 on the right of access cover identity checks and the scope of a copy in detail.

You are the controller, so the request is yours to answer. Formward is your processor and, under Article 28(3)(e) and section 8 of the DPA, assists you with tools rather than by answering on your behalf. A request that reaches Formward directly is referred to you.

The DSAR console is in the dashboard under Data subject requests, available from the Personal plan. It works on email addresses.

1. Search. Enter the person's email address. The console looks through every form in the workspaces you belong to and finds submissions where the address appears anywhere in the content, including free-text fields and earlier versions of edited answers. Results are grouped per form with the date, a preview and the names of attached files. Notification-recipient verifications and DPA acceptances tied to that address are listed too.
2. Export. Download the result as JSON. It lists each matching submission with its form, date and a preview of the content. For long submissions or attached files, open the submission in the dashboard to give the person a complete copy.
3. Erase. After a confirmation, Formward deletes every matching submission across your forms, with its attached files, answer history and webhook delivery records, plus matching recipient verifications. You get an erasure certificate as a JSON file: a hash of the email address, the number of records erased, the forms affected and the time.
4. History. Every search and erasure is logged in the request history, and erasures also in the workspace audit log. The person is identified there by a one-way hash, never by their email address.

One thing to check before erasing: the search matches the address as text, so anna@example.com also matches joanna@example.com. Read the per-form results first. And if a form never asked for an email address, search the submissions for the name or phone number instead.

1. Log the date the request arrived; the month starts then.
2. Confirm identity proportionately, usually by replying to the address on file.
3. Search the DSAR console, then the places it cannot see: notification inboxes, spreadsheets, CRMs fed by webhooks, exported files.
4. For access, send the copy together with the Article 15 information: purposes, recipients, retention period and the person's other rights.
5. For erasure, check whether an Article 17(3) exception applies, erase, and keep the certificate.
6. Reply within the month, or explain the extension within it.

A short retention period makes every one of these steps smaller. The contact us template and the contact form guide both collect an email address, which is what the console searches on.