how to remove private info from Description and comment in Jira

[NEGAR JALALIAN]

Hi 

Anyone here has some knowledge and experience of removing some specific data from Description and Comments ?

we use Jira for our customer Complaints and based on GDPR , we need to cleanup customer info which is mainly saved in Description and comments .

anyone has had similar challenge ?

[Nik Surmanidze _Actonic_]

Hi!

You can remove customer information from the issues by manually checking them for a possible violations. As it is time consuming, I would suggest using a marketplace application which specializes in the GDPR and Data Protection. 

You can use a search option in the marketplace, like Data Protection: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=data%20protection

Most of the apps have a free trial version, which can be used to see if your use case can be solved by any of the apps. 

Instead of manual labor, I would suggest browsing some applications for Data Protection.

[Nik Surmanidze _Actonic_]

Hi!

Removing customer info manually can be very time consuming but possible out of the box by checking every ticket one by one with the help of the JQL search.

In this case I would suggest a marketplace app which specializes in the GDPR and Data Protection, by giving the ability to automatically remove any personal information in your instance based on your preferences. 
If you need to search for specific information, apply actions like removal of that info, commenting on tickets and many more, while doing all of that automatically, you can try the free trial of the Data Protection and Security Toolkit: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218962/data-protection-and-security-toolkit-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

[Oliver Siebenmarck _Polymetis Apps_]

Hi @NEGAR JALALIAN ,

You are not alone in this, that's actually a quite common problem. 

There are a bunch of possible approaches to this, but currently the only 100% safe and secure solution to remove private information is to delete the issues in question. 

However, depending on the tradeoffs you are willing to make or are allowed to make, there are two main options:

1. If you need to completely hide the private info from everyone safe a few admins, setting a security level on the issue that allows only admins to see the issue might be a good step. It'll hide the private info while retaining the issue itself.
2. If you can be a bit more relaxed about it, you can just use one of the approaches @Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ listed, but be aware that every change to an issue is recorded in the issue's history, so everyone who can see the issue would be able to find the private info by looking at the history. Having said that, comments are a special case: They don't keep a history if edited, so if you edit the comments, any private info therein would be gone for good.

Finally, if this will become a regular thing, ie you'll need to identify and react to PII or sensitive data on your Jira instance from now onwards, there are apps out there to help you. Personally, I like PII Protection for Jira, which runs on Forge and cannot egress any data, but I work for Polymetis Apps, so of course I have a preference. 

Hope that helps,
 Oliver

[Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_]

Hi @NEGAR JALALIAN

You can find all tickets in issue navigator based on customer name and going to every ticket to update Description... Which doesn't sound like a best solution.

I see on the Marketplace the app which can be useful for you: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1231263/field-value-replacer-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview. I'm not familiar with this app but the description sounds like a solution which you're looking for. 

Maybe this topic can be useful for you: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Automation-How-to-remove-or-replace-summary-text-located-between/qaq-p/2199525. But in this case it will be great to have some field in which you have this customer data which you want to remove. So this value will be used in automation.

I'm afraid that there is no good solution which can avoid manual work.