4.25.1. Implementation Overview#

In the Open edX platform, the user experience is enabled by several services, such as LMS, Studio, ecommerce, credentials, discovery, and more. Personally Identifiable Identification (PII) about a user can exist in many of these services. As a consequence, to remove a user’s PII, you must be able to request each service containing PII to remove, delete, or unlink the data for that user in that service.

In the user retirement feature, a centralized process (the driver scripts) orchestrates all of these requests. For information about how to configure the driver scripts, see Setting Up the User Retirement Driver Scripts.

4.25.1.1. The User Retirement Workflow#

The user retirement workflow is a configurable pipeline of building-block APIs. These APIs are used to:

  • “Forget” a retired user’s PII

  • Prevent a retired user from logging back in

  • Prevent re-use of the username or email address of a retired user

Depending on which third parties a given Open edX instance integrates with, the user retirement process may need to call out to external services or to generate reports for later processing. Any such reports must subsequently be destroyed.

Configurability and adaptability were design goals from the beginning, so this user retirement tooling should be able to accommodate a wide range of Open edX sites and custom use cases.

The workflow is designed to be linear and rerunnable, allowing recovery and continuation in cases where a particular stage fails. Each user who has requested retirement will be individually processed through this workflow, so multiple users could be in the same state simultaneously. The LMS is the authoritative source of information about the state of each user in the retirement process, and the arbiter of state progressions, using the UserRetirementStatus model and associated APIs. The LMS also holds a table of the states themselves (the RetirementState model), rather than hard-coding the states. This was done because we cannot predict all the possible states required by all members of the Open edX community.

This example state diagram outlines the pathways users follow throughout the workflow:

digraph retirement_states_example { ranksep = "0.3"; node[fontname=Courier,fontsize=12,shape=box,group=main] { rank = same INIT[style=invis] PENDING } INIT -> PENDING; "..."[shape=none] PENDING -> RETIRING_ENROLLMENTS -> ENROLLMENTS_COMPLETE -> RETIRING_FORUMS -> FORUMS_COMPLETE -> "..." -> COMPLETE; node[group=""]; RETIRING_ENROLLMENTS -> ERRORED; RETIRING_FORUMS -> ERRORED; PENDING -> ABORTED; subgraph cluster_terminal_states { label = "Terminal States"; labelloc = b // put label at bottom {rank = same ERRORED COMPLETE ABORTED} } }

Unless an error occurs internal to the user retirement tooling, a user’s retirement state should always land in one of the terminal states. At that point, either their entry should be cleaned up from the UserRetirementStatus table or, if the state is ERRORED, the administrator needs to examine the error and resolve it. For more information, see Recovering from ERRORED.

4.25.1.2. The User Experience#

From the learner’s perspective, the vast majority of this process is obscured. The Account page contains a new section titled Delete My Account. In this section, a learner may click the Delete My Account button and enter their password to confirm their request. Subsequently, all of the learner’s browser sessions are logged off, and they become locked out of their account.

An informational email is immediately sent to the learner to confirm the deletion of their account. After this email is sent, the learner has a limited amount of time (defined by the --cool_off_days argument described in Setting Up the User Retirement Driver Scripts) to contact the site administrators and rescind their request.

At this point, the learner’s account has been deactivated, but not retired. An entry in the UserRetirementStatus table is added, and their state set to PENDING.

By default, the Delete My Account section is visible and the button is enabled, allowing account deletions to queue up. The ENABLE_ACCOUNT_DELETION feature in django settings toggles the visibility of this section. See Django Settings.

4.25.1.2.1. Third Party Auth#

Learners who registered using social authentication must first unlink their LMS account from their third-party account. For those learners, the Delete My Account button will be disabled until they do so; meanwhile, they will be instructed to follow the procedure in this help center article: How do I link or unlink my edX account to a social media account?.