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Sometimes you need to clear a value from a customer profile rather than overwrite it with a new one. This is common when honoring data subject requests under privacy laws like GDPR’s right to erasure or CCPA’s right to delete, or when cleaning up bad data captured by mistake. Maestra supports wiping personal data fields — full name, phone, email — as well as customer identifiers (like a website ID or external system ID) using a special placeholder value.

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The %CLEAR% placeholder

To wipe a field on a customer profile, send the value %CLEAR% for that field in an operation or file import.
%CLEAR% is case-sensitive. It must be written in all uppercase letters. Lowercase or mixed-case variants (%clear%, %Clear%) will not work — Maestra will treat them as ordinary string values.
After the operation runs, the field is emptied on the customer profile.

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Wiping a value through an operation

Include %CLEAR% as the value of the field you want to clear in the operation request body. For example, to wipe a customer’s websiteID identifier through an edit operation: 
"ids": {
    "websiteID": "%CLEAR%"
}
Once the operation finishes processing, that identifier is removed from the customer profile. The same pattern works for personal data fields. To wipe a phone number, for instance, pass %CLEAR% as the value of the phone field in your operation payload.

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Wiping a value through a file import

The same placeholder works in file imports. In the column for the field you want to clear, enter %CLEAR% for the row of the customer whose data should be erased. When the import runs, Maestra empties that field on each customer profile where %CLEAR% was provided.
File imports are the fastest way to wipe the same field across many customers at once — for example, when honoring a batch erasure request or cleaning up a column of data that was imported in error.

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What you can wipe

You can use %CLEAR% to clear any supported personal data field or identifier on a customer profile, including:
  • Full name
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Customer identifiers (such as websiteID or other external system IDs)

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Things to keep in mind

  • The operation must include %CLEAR% exactly — uppercase, with the percent signs.
  • Wiping a field empties its value on the customer profile. It does not delete the customer.
  • Wiping an identifier removes that specific identifier only; other identifiers on the same profile are untouched.
  • Once a field is wiped, the change is reflected in the customer profile’s change history alongside other edits.