Document expiration and self-deletion

Understand how your documents expire and learn how you can control document self-deletion

In this conceptual topic, you will learn about default document expiration on the Inkit platform. However, you’ll also discover the ways through which you can determine when a document should expire. Additionally, you’ll become acquainted with the advantages of having such control.

Prerequisites:

  • You understand how your generated documents reside on the Inkit platform
  • You know about roles and permissions
  • You grasp folders and their privacy settings

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Document expiration

For security and privacy purposes, documents on the Inkit platform automatically self-delete after seven (7) years. We’ve designed the platform this way to ensure compliance with data privacy laws. Additionally, this allows you to comply with record-keeping mandates as well.

While we offer soft- and hard-delete options for enterprise clients, the default expiration is hard deletion.

However, you will also hard-delete when using a self-deletion functionality.

Determining document self-deletion

Because management & security is the critical focus of the Inkit platform, you have access to self-deletion customizability. For example, many organizations have documents floating around, and through these deletion controls, you can prevent this from happening.

The Inkit platform offers document deletion on specific dates or after a set number of views.

The next section of this topic will describe examples and show you the advantages of self-deleting documents.

Self-deletion after a specific number of views

Let’s look at some examples of the self-deletion after n number of views feature.

An example, say you or anyone else in your organization is discussing confidential information with colleagues, and this information should by no means fall into the hands of a 3rd party. You may decide to render a document and specify it to self-destruct after one view.

The result would mean that once the recipient has viewed the document, it would destruct itself. Thus, you would be utilizing the expire after n views functionality.

Another example could be a unique password document that should only be viewed once, secured safely by its recipient, and deleted forever. Again, you would utilize the delete after n views functionality.

Note: You may want to combine the expiration after n views with PDF streaming and further leverage the power of this feature.

  • Read more about PDF streaming and allow your internal and external users to view documents without downloading them (coming soon)

Self-deletion on a specific date

Next, imagine you are sending a business proposal that is only valid for 21 days. You could use the self-deletion on a specific date to ensure this proposal is self-destructed afterward.

Yet, the most important use is in determining when collected records and data should be deleted. By being able to

pick a set date on which your document must delete itself, you can comply with modern data privacy standards.


What’s Next

Check out the API reference and start using controlled self-deletion