Custom Data Retention Policies

Connect The Dots works by ingesting a simple set of metadata from email accounts connected to the platform. When employees leave a company that uses Connect The Dots, they keep their accounts. This means they may still have access to data from their company email address at their previous employer.

Connect The Dots offers a flexible range of custom data retention policies to our enterprise customers, giving them full control over what former employees can and cannot keep in their Connect The Dots account.

To evaluate those options, it’s important to understand the data Connect The Dots gathers.

Our system captures the “from:,” “to:", subject, and date fields of emails, as well as email signatures (which are optional—you can configure your account to exclude signature scanning). We never scan or store email bodies or attachments.

The default setting allows employees to retain all data in their Connect The Dots account. Assuming you have email signature scanning turned on, this means employees that leave your company would retain:

•  A list of the people they emailed, including their job title, company, email address, a phone number (if detected), and a simple score indicating the strength of their relationship with each contact
• A record showing the subject lines of emails and when they were sent

We strongly recommend allowing your former employees to keep some or all of this data, for several reasons:

• It’s an act of goodwill that shows your willingness to invest in your employees
• Former employees are valuable for referrals to prospective hires or customers
• The data your employees take with them is unlikely to be sensitive

If you are unable to allow former employees to retain some or all of the data Connect The Dots gathered from their work email, you have three choices:

• Allow former employees to retain all data from their company email in Connect The Dots (this is the default setting)
• Allow former employees to retain no data from their company email in Connect The Dots
• Customize a data retention policy to allow former employees to retain some data from their company email in Connect The Dots, using the options shown in the graphic below

If you choose a custom data retention policy, you can choose to disallow retention of any type of data stored in Connect The Dots. For example, you might choose to allow employees to keep a record of when they emailed contacts, but not the subject lines of emails. Or you might choose to allow employees to retain a list of contacts and email addresses, but no record of email dates or subject lines. If you’re interested in a custom data retention policy, please let your account executive or customer success manager know, and we will help you choose and implement the best approach for your company.